Indiana Law Review
Volume 34
2001
Number 4
BOOK REVIEW
POVERTY, THE UNDERCLASS, AND THE ROLE OF
RACE CONSCIOUSNESS: A NEW AGE CRITIQUE OF
BLACK WEALTH/WHITE WEALTH* AND
AMERICAN APARTHEID**
REGINALD LEAM ON ROBINSON ***
The outcome of any particular experiment no longer seems to depend
only upon the “laws” of the physical world, but also upon the
consciousness of the observer. . . . [W]e must replace the term
“observer” with the term “participator.” We cannot observe the physical
world, for as the new physics tell us, there is no one physical world. We
participate within a spectrum of all possible realities.1
Children believe everything adults say. We agree with them, and our
faith is so strong that the belief system controls our whole dream of life.
We didn’t choose these beliefs, and we may have rebelled against them,
but we were not strong enough to win the rebellion. The result is
surrender to the beliefs with our agreement. . . . I call this process the
domestication of humans.2
Poverty is an abnormal condition. Poverty is the result of inefficiency.
* MELVIN L. OLIVER & THOMAS M. SHAPIRO, BLACK WEALTH/WHITE WEALTH: A NEW
PERSPECTIVE ON RACIAL INEQUALITY (1995).
** DOUGLAS S. MASSEY & NANCY A. DENTON, AMERICAN APARTHEID: SEGREGATION AND
THE MAKING OF THE UNDERCLASS (1993).
*** Professor of Law, Howard Law School. B.A., 1981, magna cum laude, Howard
University; M.A., 1983, University of Chicago; Exchange Scholar, 1984-85, Yale University; J.D.,
1989, University of Pennsylvania; Ph.D. Candidate, 1993, University of Chicago. I would like to
thank Dean Alice Gresham Bullock for supporting my application for a University Research Grant.
I would also like to thank my research assistants, Stephanie Masker (class of 2001), Noreen Muhib
(class of 2002), and Rondine Twist (class of 2002) for their dedication, skills, and research. I
would also like to thank Ms. Helane Davis, Research Librarian, for her support and efforts. Lastly,
I am also indebted to Elizabeth Irene Lopez Robinson, Ph.D., for her insights and informative
discussions. Of course, the politics and errata of this essay belong exclusively to me.
1. MICHAEL TALBOT, MYSTICISM AND THE NEW PHYSICS 3 (1993).
2. DON MIGUEL RUÍZ, THE FOUR AGREEMENTS—A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO PERSONAL
FREEDOM: A TOLTEC WISDOM BOOK 5-6 (1997) (emphasis in original).
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Poverty is not the result of the lack of opportunity. Not in yourself, not
anywhere. Poverty is the result of inefficiency, or ignorance. And if you
and I can learn to deal with the only Mind there is, we will no longer be
poor. We can attract to ourselves people and things which will obliterate
that poverty. It will be a law of gravity, no other thing but principle.
When you set into motion a power of mind, don’t you be surprised what
happens.3
INTRODUCTION
Who brings our thoughts into reality?4 According to Michael Talbot, we all
do. Nothing of us simply watches or observes an experience. Rather, we
proactively co-create experiences.5 We co-create in at least two ways:
deliberately or by default.6 By deliberate, I mean that we can self-consciously
intend our experiences; or by default, we can allow others to influence what we
intend and thus what we experience.7 In this way, social experiences like
3. ERNEST HOLMES, LOVE & LAW: THE UNPUBLISHED TEACHINGS 39-40 (Marilyn Leo ed.
2001).
4. See BARBARA MARCINIAK, BRINGERS OF THE DAWN: TEACHINGS FROM THE PLEIADIANS
10 (1992) (“[T]hought creates. No matter what situation you find yourself in, it is the power of
your thoughts that got you there. It is also the impeccable belief that thought creates that will
transform your experience and the planetary existence.”); JANE ROBERTS, THE NATURAL OF
PERSONAL REALITY – SPECIFIC, PRACTICAL TECHNIQUES FOR SOLVING EVERYDAY PROBLEMS AND
ENRICHING THE LIFE YOU KNOW: A SETH BOOK xvi (1994) [hereinafter cited as SETH, PERSONAL
REALITY] (“Experience is the product of the mind, the spirit, conscious thoughts and feelings, and
unconscious thoughts and feelings. These together form the reality that you know. You are hardly
at the mercy of a reality, therefore, that exists apart from yourself, or is thrust upon you.”).
5. I first introduced the concept of co-creation into the law review literature in 1996. See
Reginald Leamon Robinson, Race, Myth, and Narrative in the Social Construction of the Black
Self, 40 HOWARD L.J. 1, 55 n.240 (1996).
6. See generally JERRY HICKS & ESTHER HICKS, ABRAHAM SPEAKS: A NEW BEGINNING
I—HANDBOOK FOR JOYOUS SURVIVAL (1996) [hereinafter cited as HICKS & HICKS, ABRAHAM
SPEAKS I].
7. 3 LEE CARROLL, KRYON—ALCHEMY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT: A GUIDE TO HUMAN
TRANSITION INTO THE NEW AGE 76 (1995). The Kryon writes:
For to co-create means that you and Spirit and those around you create your own reality.
This may seem like a paradox to you, for you have been told only to co-create for
yourselves. But what happens when you start to co-create for yourself is that those
around you are affected in a positive way. . . . As you co-create for yourself, others are
touched and helped; some are even enlightened! . . . and all because you co-create for
yourself.
Id. See Reginald Leamon Robinson, The Shifting Race-Consciousness Matrix and the Multiracial
Category Movement: A Critical Reply to Professor Hernandez, 20 B.C. THIRD WORLD L.J. 231
(2000). In this essay, I described co-creation in the context of race and white supremacy.
By co-creation, I mean that each of us has been socially conditioned, principally in our
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A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
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poverty, wealth, and residential segregation do not simply happen. Some of us
play the role of the wealthy, and some the poor. But we actively intend or
passively allow all of these experiences (e.g., poverty).8 According to Don
Miguel Ruíz, earth and personal dreams work concertedly to reinforce larger
social practices and to limit how individuals might re-imagine what a world could
be.9 For Ruíz, earth dreams approximate macro- or social structures. And for
him, personal dreams constitute personal experiences or realities. Together, they
serve as the basis for parents (or the state) to shape our beliefs.10 According to
Ruíz, our parents “hook” our attention,11 and in so doing they shape how we
think12 . And how we think reinforces what is “reality.”13 By focusing our
primary environments, to accept that race, race consciousness (i.e., thinking of ourselves
in racial terms), racism, and white supremacy are naturally occurring (i.e., human
nature) and socially inevitable [i.e., human history]. Once we accept that this inevitable
social reality is upon us, we consciously and unconsciously focus our minds on race.
This focus alone is sufficient to create and maintain race and race consciousness.
However, despite this focus, each of us experiences race and race consciousness
differently. . . . It is this difference that creates the opportunity for new thinking with
each generation on race and race consciousness, and it is this difference that will
eventually give so-called black people the courage to think of themselves without any
veil of race and without any overlay of race consciousness.
Id. at 232-33 n.2 (citations omitted).
8. SETH, PERSONAL REALITY, supra note 4, at 31 (“If you are poor you may feel quite selfrighteous in your financial condition, looking with scorn upon those who are wealthy, telling
yourself that money is wrong and so reinforcing the condition of poverty.”).
9. See RUÍZ, supra note 2, at 7-8 (“We pretend to be what we are not because we are afraid
of being rejected. The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough. Eventually
we become someone that we are not. We become a copy of Mamma’s beliefs, Daddy’s beliefs,
society’s beliefs, and religion’s beliefs.”).
10. Cf. Moe v. Dinkins, 533 F. Supp. 623 (S.D.N.Y. 1981), aff’d, 669 F.2d 67 (2d Cir. 1982)
(“Although the possibility for parents to act in other than the best interest of their child exists, the
law presumes that the parents ‘possess what the child lacks in maturity’ and that ‘the natural bonds
of affection lead parents to act in the best interest of their children.’”).
11. RUÍZ, supra note 2, at 3 (“Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus
only on that which we want to perceive. We can perceive millions of things simultaneously, but
using our attention, we can hold whatever we want to perceive in the foreground of our mind. The
adults around us hooked our attention and put information into our minds through repetition. That
is the way we learned everything we know.”).
12. See HICKS & HICKS, ABRAHAM SPEAKS I, supra note 6, at 42 (“As you enter physical
experience, you are surrounded by beings who have already arrived at many conclusions. They
have created within themselves many beliefs based upon the life experience that they have lived –
or upon the stories that they have heard from those who surrounded them at the time that they were
born.”).
13. 1 NEALE DONALD WALSCH, CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD: AN UNCOMMON DIALOGUE 107
(1996) (“We make real that to which we pay attention. The Master knows this. The Master places
himself at choice with regard to that which she chooses to make real.”).
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attention, parents and society play profoundly important roles in shaping our
thoughts, our reality (e.g., poverty).14
By thought, I mean consciousness,15 and consciousness produces a material
reality (or material privations).16 Consciousness influences how we think, talk,
and act.17 By think, I mean the manner in which people process their inner
beliefs, a thinking that gets governed by how people believe and thus perceive
“reality.”18 By talk, I mean the manner in which people use words. According
to Ruíz,
the word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is a force; it
is the power you have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby
to create the events in your life. . . . The word is the most powerful tool
you have as a human; it is the tool of magic.19
14. See C. WRIGHT MILLS, THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 3-4 (1999). Mills argues:
Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the
course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means
for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which
they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the
interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot
cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural
transformations that usually lie behind them.
Id.
15. Consciousness has many different and competing definitions. Some definitions lend
themselves to the esoteric, while some harbor a scientific basis that is no less esoteric. See, e.g.,
1 JANE ROBERTS, THE “UNKNOWN” REALITY: A SETH BOOK 42 (1988) (“Consciousness is
composed of energy, with everything that implies. The psyche, then, can be thought of as a
conglomeration of highly charged ‘particles’ of energy, following rules and properties, many simply
unknown to you.”). See also GERALD M. EDELMAN & GIULIO TONONI, A UNIVERSE OF
CONSCIOUSNESS: HOW MATTER BECOMES IMAGINATION 18 (2000) (“[E]ach conscious state is
experienced as a whole that cannot be subdivided into independent components . . . . [E]ach
conscious state is selected from a repertoire of billions and billions of possible conscious states,
each with different behavioral consequences. . . . This [approach] expands on William James’
prescient notion of consciousness as a process—one that is private, selective, and continuous yet
continually changing.”).
16. Cf. TALBOT, supra note 1, at 102 (“Consciousness can act on Matter and transform it.
This ultimate conversion of Matter into Consciousness and perhaps one day even of Consciousness
into Matter is the aim of the supramental yoga.”).
17. See generally Reginald Leamon Robinson, “Expert” Knowledge: Introductory
Comments on Race Consciousness, 20 B.C. THIRD WORLD L.J. 145 (2000); Robinson, supra note
7, at 231.
18. See HICKS & HICKS, ABRAHAM SPEAKS I, supra note 6, at 42 (“As you are stimulated to
think about beliefs that others offer, very often you attract life experience that ‘proves’ to you that
it is just as they have said that it is. For as you believe that it is, it is, and for that reason, beliefs
change very slowly.”).
19. RUÍZ, supra note 2, at 26.
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By act, I mean daily living (e.g., physical action and dynamic interaction) that
depends on how a person believes and talks.20 By acting, we confirm that our
beliefs and our narrative must be true. Few of us act against our spoken or
internalized beliefs. In effect, thinking, talking, and acting form overlapping
concentric circles, all of which intensify what is actually or potentially real, and
they determine how we might probably act.21 We do not act against our thoughts,
and we speak in a matter that reinforces what we already believe or know.22 In
sum, our beliefs (i.e., thinking) inform how we declare to others and reinforce in
ourselves (i.e., talking) why we live as we do (i.e., acting). Therefore, in this
essay, I will simply use the term “consciousness,” and when I do, the reader
should recall thinking, talking, and acting.
In America, race and racism color our consciousness.23 A race consciousness
operates like thinking, talking, and acting. By race consciousness, I adopt Janet
E. Helm’s definition: “Race consciousness refers to the awareness that
(socialization due to) racial-group membership can influence one’s intrapsychic
dynamics as well as interpersonal relationships. Thus, one’s racial awareness
may be subliminal and not readily admitted into consciousness or it may be
conscious and not readily repressed.”24 By constructing our experiences through
a race consciousness, we deliberately poison our personal worlds, not realizing
20. Id. at 4. Ruíz states: “The outside dream hooks our attention and teaches us what to
believe, beginning with the language that we speak. Language is the code for understanding and
communication between humans. Every letter, every word in each language is an agreement.” Id.
21. Cf. EDELMAN & TONONI, supra note 15, at 201. Thinking and language play a crucial role
in perception.
[W]e must review the relationship between internalist and externalist views of the
mental. The internalist view (a first-person view) is that as we interact with the world
to establish our beliefs, their content is determined by particular kinds of brain activity
that are reachable by introspection. The externalist view (a third-person view) is that
mental life is a construct that is mainly dependent on the interpersonal or social
exchanges that are based on language. According to this view, the whole system of
language is essential to thought; it is the public aspect of language that gives thought its
meaning and that is the basis of mental content.
Id.
22. SETH, PERSONAL REALITY, supra note 4, at 19. Seth states:
Each person experiences a unique reality, different from any other individual’s. This
reality springs outward from the inner landscape of thoughts, feelings, expectations and
beliefs. If you believe that the inner self works against you rather than for you, then you
hamper its functioning – or rather, you force it to behave in a certain way because of
your beliefs.
Id.
23. See generally DOCUMENTS OF AMERICAN PREJUDICE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF WRITINGS ON
RACE FROM THOMAS JEFFERSON TO DAVID DUKE (S. T. Joshi ed., 1998).
24. Janet E. Helms, Introduction: Review of Racial Identity Terminology, in BLACK AND
WHITE RACIAL IDENTITY: THEORY, RESEARCH, AND PRACTICE 3, 7 (Janet E. Helms ed., 1990).
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that we also sicken, injure, and destroy ourselves.25 By living through a “racefocused consciousness,” we reinforce America’s notion of blacks,26 and we pay
homage to the vested limitation that prior black family generations have passed
on too.27 Yet, with such a “race-focused consciousness,” we shut ourselves off
from other probable realities.28 By shutting ourselves off, we resist change,
oppression, or injustice, thus assuming that oppression for example must be a
true, external reality.29 As we learned from Seth, all realities are probable, and
as we change our thinking, we co-create new probable realities and new probable
selves.30 In this way, race does not use us. Rather, we experience race if and
only if we give our attention to race and its consciousness. That is, we co-create
reality from the inside out,31 and in this way as Ruíz pointed out, society—media,
25. See, e.g., PATRICIA RAYBON, MY FIRST WHITE FRIEND: CONFESSIONS ON RACE, LOVE,
2 (1996) (“And I thought my soul would die from [hating]. [Hate] was killing
me anyway—this race-focused consciousness—because it confined my spirit and my vision and
sanity too. And I felt pathological —as confused and mixed up as some white sociologists have
always claimed African Americans naturally are.”).
26. See, e.g., MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 94 (“White apprehensions about racial
mixing are associated with the belief that having black neighbors undermines property values and
reduces neighborhood safety.”). See also Janet E. Helms, Toward a Model of White Racial Identity
Development, in BLACK AND WHITE RACIAL IDENTITY, supra note 24, at 54 (“[S]ignificant persons
in one’s life (e.g., media, parents, peers) inform one of the existence of Blacks as well as how one
ought to think about them.”).
27. See generally RAYBON, supra note 25. See also Clarence Page, Showing My Color:
Biracial Kids Face Burdens of Two Worlds, HOUS. CHRON., Mar. 14, 1996, at 1 (“Black Americans
who have internalized white supremacist attitudes and values become agents of those attitudes and
values, enforcing them in others and passing them on to new generations more effectively than the
Ku Klux Klan ever could.”).
28. See Janet E. Helms, An Overview of Black Racial Identity Theory, in BLACK AND WHITE
RACIAL IDENTITY, supra note 24, at 9, 24 (“[S]tatements like ‘You talk like you’re White’ imply
that the speaker has the right to judge what constitutes Black speech whereas the person addressed
does not and, at the same time, that the person does not measure up to Black behavioral standards
in some important way.”).
29. 1 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 102 (“You cannot resist something to which you grant no
reality. The act of resisting a thing is the act of granting it life. When you resist any energy, you
place it there. The more you resist, the more you make it real—whatever you are resisting.”).
30. See generally 1 ROBERTS, supra note 15, at 66. According to Seth:
The body that you have is a probable body. It is the result of one line of “development”
that could be taken to your particular earth personality in flesh. All of the other possible
lines of development also occur, however. They occur at once, but each one
simultaneously affects every other. There is actually far greater interaction here than
you realize, because you are not used to looking for it. The harder you work to maintain
the official accepted idea of the self in conventional terms, the more of course you block
out any kind of unpredictability.
Id.
31. See R.D. LAING, THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE 21 (1968) (“The ‘inner,’ then, is our
AND FORGIVENESS
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parents, and peers—work exceedingly long and hard to “hook” our attention, so
that we can reinforce the dominant social narrative.32 We reinforce this narrative
by thinking, talking, and acting as if social reality (e.g., poverty) must be real,
external, and inevitable.33 Once we give mental intent to select a racialized lens
by which to construct experiences, we—all of us—make race and its
consciousness real, and by making it “real,” we limit our agency and others.34
Given Talbot’s, Ruíz’s, and Seth’s positions, poverty begins within our
consciousness. Unfortunately, we have racialized poverty, and in so doing, we
co-create and reinforce the idea that blacks suffer poverty because they lack
morality (e.g., sex), because they ignore middle-class values (e.g., thrift), and
because they refuse to work (e.g., lazy).35 Fortunately, poverty ignores morality.
personal idiom of experiencing our bodies, other people, the animate and inanimate world;
imagination, dreams, fantasy, and beyond that to even further reaches of experiences.”).
32. See RUÍZ, supra note 2, at 3. Ruiz asserts that:
By [hooking] our attention we learn a whole reality, a whole dream. We learned how
to behave in society: what to believe and what not to believe; what is acceptable and
what is not acceptable; what is good and what is bad; what is beautiful and what is ugly;
what is right and what is wrong. It was all there already—all that knowledge, all those
rules and concepts about how to behave in the world.
Id.
33. Richard Delgado, Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative, 87
MICH. L. REV. 2411, 2413-14 (1989). Delgado aptly argues:
Stories, parables, chronicles, and narratives are powerful means for deploying
mindset—the bundle of presuppositions, received wisdoms, and shared understandings
against a background of which legal and political discourse takes place. These matters
are rarely focused on. They are like eyeglasses we have worn a long time. They are
nearly invisible; we use them to scan and interpret the world and only rarely examine
them for themselves. Ideology—the received wisdom—makes current social
arrangements seem fair and natural. Those in power sleep well at night—their conduct
does not seem to them like oppression.
Id.
34. See generally Paul Hoggett, Agency, Rationality, and Social Policy, 30 J. SOC. POL’Y 37
(2001) (In discussing and critiquing Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration and human agency,
Hoggett argues that we must prepare a robust account of active welfare subjects so that we can
“confront the real experiences of powerlessness and psychic injury which result from injustice and
oppression and [so that we can] acknowledge human capacities for destructiveness towards self and
others.”). For an indepth discussion of structuration and human reflective agency, see ANTHONY
GIDDENS, THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY: OUTLINE OF THE THEORY OF STRUCTURATION (1984)
[hereinafter cited as GIDDENS, CONSTITUTION]; ANTHONY GIDDENS, CENTRAL PROBLEMS IN SOCIAL
THEORY: ACTION, STRUCTURE, AND CONTRADICTION IN SOCIAL ANALYSIS (1979).
35. See, e.g., James Jennings, Persistent Poverty in the United States: Review of Theories
and Explanations, in A NEW INTRODUCTION TO POVERTY: THE ROLE OF RACE, POWER, AND
POLITICS 13-38 (Louis Kushnick & James Jennings eds., 1999) (providing a general overview
cultural, moral, genetic, racial, and family structure explanation for the persistent of poverty). In
Jennings’ essay, he cites George Gilder, who writes: “Their problem is not poverty but a collapse
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Whether black or white, whether good or bad, people succeed.36 These people
simply (but not without sustained intent and effort) focus their mental and
spiritual energy. More than likely, they do not squander their time blaming
racism, capitalism, or God.37 In this way, Ted Turner, Reginald Lewis, Michael
Millken, Madame C. Walker, or Ivan Bosky can garner wealth. Similarly,
Maxine Waters, a citizen who haled from a poor, working-class community, can
achieve her dream by becoming an important member of the United States House
of Representatives. Today, regardless of socio-economic status, people still
“succeed” and “fail.” In any event, “external” reality dynamically reflects our
collective (but ever changing) inner thoughts, our impoverished self images,38
and as such, society co-creates poverty and wealth.39 Without us and our
thinking, poverty could not sustain itself. Poverty’s existence depends
exclusively on the attention to which we give it.
As between rich and poor, black and white, what might explain the
difference? Although liberal and conservative sociologists have provided us with
many factors and explanations,40 the variables are too many, too probable. What
is certain, however, is that we co-create all of our experiences, including poverty,
the underclass, and the wealthy. We exist to have power over others. Without
wealth or poverty, we have no identity. We have no external basis by which to
evaluate our inherent value. We have forgotten that we are “gods.”41 We have
instead enslaved ourselves to the thinking, talking, and acting of an apparent
of family discipline and sexual morality.” Id. at 18.
36. See, e.g., THOMAS J. STANLEY & WILLIAM D. DANKO, THE MILLIONAIRE NEXT DOOR: THE
SURPRISING SECRET OF AMERICA’S WEALTH (1996).
37. See, e.g., RALPH WILEY, WHY BLACK PEOPLE TEND TO SHOUT: COLD FACTS AND WRY
VIEWS FROM A BLACK MAN’S WORLD (1991).
38. See KEN KEYES, JR., HANDBOOK TO HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS, at xiv (5th ed. 1975).
39. See Lee Rainwater, Neutralizing the Disinherited: Some Psychological Aspects of
Understanding the Poor, in PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS IN POVERTY 9, 10 (Vernon L. Allen ed.,
1970) (“[I]n every society individuals have a conception of how their system operates and why it
operates that way that is parallel to, but not identical with, an adequate sociological understanding
of the social system.”).
40. See, e.g., David R. Quammen, Poverty in America: Progress Interrupted, METRO
HERALD, July 21, 1995, at 8 (“A few months ago, Edwin J. Fuelner, President of the Heritage
Foundation, wrote in a Washington Times article that even with the trillions of dollars spent on the
poor, poverty in 1993 is essentially the same as in 1963 (15.3 percent then versus 15.1 percent in
1993), laying blame on the personal failings of the poor.”). See also Hermon George, Jr., Black
America, the “Underclass,” and the Subordination Process, in A NEW INTRODUCTION TO
POVERTY, supra note 35, at 197-98 (discussing liberal and conservative explanations for the
persistent of poverty and the underclass, noting that some conservative thinkers simply wish to
abandon the adult black underclass “while trumpeting the virtues of low-wage work as an enforcer
of social obligation”).
41. Psalms 82:6 (King James) (“Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.”).
See also RUÍZ, supra note 2, at xviii (“It is true. I am God. But you are also God. We are the same,
you and I. We are images of light. We are God.”).
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“external,” objective force over which we claim no power.
Liberal poverty studies fault “external,” objective forces (i.e., social
structure).42 They premise that social structure robs citizens of equal
opportunities,43 and without equal opportunities, many citizens cannot attain
access to material goods.44 By social structure, I mean the manner in which
social systems distribute resources like wealth, income, and property.45 Some
early poverty studies looked at individual behavior and choices.46 Some studies
focused on “learned helplessness.”47 Others have framed their analysis on the
“culture of poverty” theory.48 Unfortunately, the work by sociologists or other
42. See, e.g., JIM SLEEPER , LIBERAL RACISM: HOW FIXATING ON RACE SUBVERT’S THE
AMERICAN DREAM 39-40 (1998) (“Liberals must admit that their charges of ‘racism’ are often so
extenuated and exotic that they reinforce racism by making blacks seem an exotic appendage to the
polity. . . . Since most liberals have qualms about saying this, they grasp at other explanations:
‘Blame the economy as well as racism; blame class as well as race.’”).
43. See generally MANNING MARABLE, HOW CAPITALISM UNDERDEVELOPED BLACK AMERICA
(1983); DOUGLAS G. GLASGOW, THE BLACK UNDERCLASS: POVERTY, UNEMPLOYMENT, AND
ENTRAPMENT OF GHETTO YOUTH (1981); WILLIAM K. TABB, THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE
BLACK GHETTO (1970).
44. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *.
45. ALLAN G. JOHNSON, THE BLACKWELL DICTIONARY OF SOCIOLOGY: A USER’S GUIDE TO
SOCIOLOGICAL LANGUAGE 295 (2d ed. 2000) (defining social structure in part as “a crucial defining
concept for sociology as a way of thinking about social life”). Johnson also writes that: “The
second structural characteristic of a social system includes various kinds of distributions. . . . In
similar ways we can describe the structural distribution of various other products and resources of
social life, from wealth and income and property to prestige and access to education and health
care.” Id. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 73-80 (discussing the social distribution of
wealth).
46. See, e.g., Susan Saegert & Gary Winkel, Paths to Community Empowerment: Organizing
at Home, 24 AM. J. COMMUNITY PSYCHOL. 517, 517 (1996), available at 1996 WL 12870927
(“Social scientists’ debates about the role of behavior in perpetuating the poor life chances of those
who live in the worst inner-city neighborhoods are as persistent as the poverty that characterizes
these areas.”).
47. See, e.g., George Gilder, The Collapse of the American Family, 89 PUB. INT. 20 (1987)
(attacking females who head families and government welfare programs as deteriorating the family
structure and contributing to successive cycles of poverty and destructive values).
48. See, e.g., WILLIAM A. KELSO, POVERTY AND THE UNDERCLASS: CHANGING PERCEPTIONS
OF THE POOR IN AMERICA 5 (1994) (“In the early 1960s, academics on the right like Edward
Banfield had insisted that the poor were afflicted by a ‘culture of poverty,’ which made it
impossible for them to ever compete successfully in the workplace.”). See also William J. Wilson,
The Ghetto Underclass and the Social Transformation of the Inner City, 19 BLACK SCHOLAR 10
(1988). Wilson argues against “culture of poverty” which asserts that a person’s “basic values and
attitudes have been internalized and thereby influence behavior.” Id. at 16. Rather, Wilson prefers
the theory of “social isolation.” Under this theory, the lack of social contact between blacks and
whites and between classes “enhances the effects of living in a highly concentrated poverty area.”
Id.
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scholars who look critically at “learned helplessness” or “culture of poverty” has
been framed as conservative by liberal thinkers. As Melvin Oliver and Thomas
Shapiro and as Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton do, liberal thinkers perhaps
focus less on individuals and more on social structural context. It is not that
these liberal thinkers lack a familiarity with these so-called conservative
approaches.49 Rather, they find them less analytically tasty for the project that
they undertake: faulting social structure (e.g., white structural racism).50
By ignoring the degree to which race consciousness works intimately and
interdependently with social structures, studies by sociologists like Melvin
Oliver, Thomas Shapiro, Douglas Massey, and Nancy Denton miss the ultimate
point. By focusing only on social structures as explanatory variables (e.g., white
structural racism) for the persistent of poverty, we become fixated on raw data.51
We spend lots of time and money describing a world that could never exist
without us. We may even look to political economy and the internationalization
of domestic economies to explain structural shifts that deposit the respected poor
permanently into the underclass. Unfortunately, these data, descriptions, and
theories rarely if ever uncover profoundly new factors that might better explain
why poverty persists. Any explanation, data, or description that ignores human
agency and race consciousness must fail. Such meta-models hover over the
problem, and at base the problem emanates from the manner in which we dream
our possibilities. By focusing on social structures, we implicitly forgive the
manner in which institutional forces (e.g., parents) convince citizens to accept
limitation or to transcend astounding heights. By conjoining social structure and
psychological factors in the co-creation and maintenance of poverty, we
recognize that we can alter our reality, principally because reality pulses and
49. See, e.g., MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 5-6 (discussing the poverty theories by
Oscar Lewis, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Edward Banfield, Charles Murray, and Lawrence Mead).
50. See JOE R. FEAGIN & HERNÁN VERA, WHITE RACISM : THE BASICS 16 (1995). In
attributing most socio-psychological phenomena to white racism, Feagin and Hernán argue that:
Racism in thought and practice destroys the feelings of solidarity that people normally
feel toward each other. A target of discrimination is no longer seen as “one of us.” The
other becomes less than human, a nonperson. White racism transforms the black self,
the other-outsider into something less than the white self and reduces the black
individual’s humanity. Black individuals become “they” or “you people.” Black men,
women, and children become hated objects instead of subjects. White racism involves
a massive breakdown of empathy, the human capacity to experience the feelings of
members of an outgroup viewed as different. Racial hostility impedes the capacity to
realize that “it could have been me.”
Id.
51. Cf. Raymond S. Franklin, White Uses of the Black Underclass, in A NEW INTRODUCTION
TO POVERTY, supra note 35, at 119, 136 (“‘Hard’ data suggest that the ‘facts’ of crime must be
caused by the absence of ‘mental’ traits or enduring intergenerational ‘cultural’ transmissions; this,
moreover, cannot be changed, even under favorable environmental conditions.”); id. (“My point
is that these are old beliefs dressed in new garb. There are other ways of presenting crime data that
enhance our perspectives rather than feed our preexisting racial inclinations.”) (citation omitted).
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
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shifts constantly.52 Reality lives like virgin, unmolded clay, and in the hands of
the skilled artist, reality flows from the minds of its handler. Poverty thus
becomes an aspect of social reality and flows from social structures because the
structures have achieved one or more of their explicit or implicit probable
goals.53 By assuming that social structures like the relatively autonomy of state
can operate without us, we fatally and falsely assume that external, objective
forces constructed poverty and then selected blacks, minorities, and women as
necessary victims. By examining the interrelationship between social structure
and human agency, sociologists can begin to ask different questions, viz., who cocreates poverty?
In addressing who co-creates poverty, I posit a troubling, uncompromising
premise. This premise grows out of an empowering philosophy. We co-create
our own personal worlds and manifold social realities.54 Based on this
philosophy, every human being is a very powerful reality creator,55 and this
premise cognizes no victimizer or victimized.56 As such, whites do not victimize
52. See generally 1 ROBERTS, supra note 15.
53. Cf. DAVID BOHM, WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER 148-49 (1995). As the late
quantum physicist David Bohm wrote,
Consider, for example, how on looking at the night sky, we are able to discern structures
covering immense stretches of space and time, which are in some sense contained in the
movements of light in the tiny space encompassed by the eye (and also how instruments,
such as optical and radio telescopes, can discern more and more of this totality,
contained in each region of space).
There is the germ of a new notion of order here. This order is not to be understood
solely in terms of a regular arrangement of objects (e.g., in rows) or as a regular
arrangement of events (e.g., in a series). Rather, a total order is contained, in some
implicit sense, in each region of space and time.
Now, the world ‘implicit’ is based on the verb ‘to implicate.’ This means ‘to fold
inward’ (as multiplication means ‘folding many times’). So we may be led to explore
the notion that in some sense each region contains a total structure ‘enfolded’ within it.
Id.
54. See, e.g., Barbara Marciniak, Pleiadians Book: Sage of Family of Light 3 (Sept. 11,
1991), (visited May 23, 2001), available at http://www.spiritweb.com/Spirit/pleiadians-part13.html.
Marciniak writes: “Many of you have been practicing the art of projection. That means that you
blame someone else for what you have created. That is acting completely against all that we have
taught you. No one else does anything to you ever. You create your reality. In order for you to
get the body ready to move into the multi-dimensional version of self, you must stop judging it.”
Id. (emphasis added).
55. See 1 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 103 (“Have I told you all thought is creative?”).
56. Id. at 75. According to Walsch,
The promise of God is that you are His son. Her offspring. Its likeness. His equal.
Ah . . . here is where you get hung up. You can accept “His son,” “offspring,”
“likeness,” but you recoil at being called “His equal.” It is too much to accept. Too
much bigness, too much wonderment—too much responsibility. For if you are God’s
equal, that means nothing is being done to you—and all things are created by you.
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blacks. Likewise, blacks do not victimize whites. Blacks, whites, and others
embrace a “race-focused consciousness,” and thus they lend their mental energies
to poverty and residential segregation.57 Once blacks, whites, and others have
been steeped in the dominant social narrative, they work collectively, mostly
unconsciously, to co-create poverty and residential segregation. In fact, the
persistence of poverty and residential segregation depends on blacks, whites, and
others thinking, talking, and acting in very narrow, limited, and disempowered
ways.
Accordingly, we must vitiate and condemn words like victims and
victimization. In this way, notwithstanding Massey and Denton’s thesis, white
racism cannot explain extant poverty and residential segregation.58 By looking
to white structural racism, by projecting our thinking, talking, and acting onto
others, we absolve ourselves of the degree to which our inner consciousness fuels
personal worlds and manifold social realities. In these worlds and realities,
blacks, whites, and others expect to face poverty, wealth, and residential
segregation, and by so expecting, they actively, even if a meditative unconscious
narrative, co-create them. By rejecting concepts like victimizer and victimized,
we can choose to acknowledge that we are powerful reality creators. As
powerful reality creators, blacks play active, co-creative roles in why poverty and
residential segregation persist, and therefore in addressing who co-creates
poverty, we must ask why very powerful reality creators like blacks and whites
believe that poverty and residential segregation serve the grandest vision of
angelic humans?59
Part I discusses and presents the foundational concepts on which these
sociologists have premised Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid.
Part II critically evaluates why these books rely heavily on social structure to
explain the manner in which we have co-creatively racialized vast wealth, abject
poverty, and racial segregation.60 In so doing, Black Wealth/White Wealth and
American Apartheid dismiss blacks from the race consciousness in which they
must perforce key players. As a corollary, we—all of us—can alter our personal
There can be no more victims and no more villains—only outcomes of your thought
about a thing.
I tell you this: all you see in your world is the outcome of your idea about it.
Id. (emphasis in original).
57. See, e.g., SHELBY STEELE, A DREAM DEFERRED 3-4 (1998) (“[B]lack American leaders
were practicing a politics that drew the group into a victim-focused racial identity that, in turn,
stifled black advancement more than racism itself did.”).
58. See generally MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 1-16 (discussing and describing
white racism as the missing link in the persistent of ghettos and the urban underclass).
59. See generally 3 CARROLL, supra note 7.
60. See, e.g., OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 68 (“[W]e contend that the buried fault line
of the American social system is who owns financial wealth—and who does not. The existence of
such a wealthy class ensures that no matter the skills and talents, the work ethic and character of
its children, the latter will inherit wealth, property, position, and power.”).
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1389
worlds and manifold social realities if we choose to do so.61 By looking to social
structure (e.g., white structural racism) as a juggernaut over which our race
consciousness has very little immediate influence, we must patiently await a deus
ex machina to save us from the poverty and residential segregation that we cocreated. We may lay blame at God’s feet, but the dirty hand that does so belongs
to us. Part III invites the reader to consider if a New Age critical legal theory can
enable us to change poverty and residential segregation.
I. “EXTERNAL ,” OBJECTIVE STRUCTURAL REALITY : WHITE RACISM
PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY AND RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION
AND THE
A. Introduction: Poverty and the Problem of Social Structure
What is poverty? Is it material privations? Is it the absence of support,
money, or goods? Does it connote that one lacks the material means for a proper
existence?62 If so, what does “material” mean? What does “support” mean?
How little “money” must I have? What too few “goods” amounts to an absence?
What is a “proper existence”? To whom should we look for these terms’
meaning? Assuming that we can garner clear, uncontested meanings, who should
provide what “material” means? Should it be the state? Should it be subject
citizens? Should we look to the “free” market? Can we combine these probable
sources? And if so, does one carry more weight than others? If as classic
liberalism would argue that the state exists to provide a safe public sphere in
which citizens can maximize their private preferences, then can a citizen’s wealth
maximizing behavior become the predominant factor of an analysis of poverty?63
By thinking of poverty as an effect of political economy,64 are we suggesting that
we can only understand poverty by looking to the state?
In Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid, both authors ignored
who co-created poverty. Likewise, by glossing over the human source to poverty,
liberals ignore the concomitant question: who is the poor?65 Rather, they, like
61. See generally ROBERT M. PIRSIG, ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE:
AN INQUIRY INTO VALUES (1981).
62. See WEBSTER’S ENCYCLOPEDIC UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
1127 (1994) (defining poverty).
63. See, e.g., JOHN LOCKE, TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT (Peter Laslett ed., 1965).
64. See, e.g., HENRY GEORGE, PROGRESS AND POVERTY—THE REMEDY: AN INQUIRY INTO
THE CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSIONS AND OF INCREASE OF WANT WITH INCREASE OF WEALTH
(1898).
65. See KELSO, supra note 48, at 15 (In defining the poor, Mollie Orshansky of the Social
Security Administration “argued that poverty was essentially a problem of absolute rather than
relative deprivation. She believed that people should be considered poor if their income fell below
some acceptable minimum dollar amount.”); id. at 25-26 (In defining the underclass, and while
noting that the underclass constitutes a heterogenous group, “all commentators agree that if there
is any one trait that seems to characterize the underclass it is their unwillingness to flout the
traditional norms of what society generally considers acceptable behavior. . . . Similarly, the public
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other scholars66 looked to “external,” objective reality, viz., the state. By
emphasizing the state’s role as if Structure existed independently from the
manner in which we collectively think,67 these scholars have missed the larger
point.68 Nevertheless, the state has played, and continues to play, a vital but nonexclusive role in the persistence of poverty. By state, I mean social structure,
which in part means the manner in which social systems distribute resources like
wealth, income, and property.
In Black Wealth/White Wealth, Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro defined
poverty by looking to racialized material inequality, and for these scholars,
racialized material inequality originated in “external,” objective reality. They
began by defining wealth and income. Wealth meant an individual’s and
family’s access to life chances. Wealth constituted “a stock of assets owned at
a particular time. Wealth is what people own.” Wealth indicates a family’s
“command over financial resources that [the family] has accumulated over its
lifetime along with those resources that have been inherited across
generations.”69 Wealth embraced two concepts: net worth and net financial
assets. Net worth represented a complete inventory of all assets less debts. Net
financial assets meant the “flow of money over time.” Income referred to a
person’s wages, retirement, and social welfare. Wealth and income conjoined to
often finds the underclass to be strangers [alluding to Albert Camus’ existential work, The Stranger]
in the sense that they are at a loss for explaining their often self-destructive behavior.”).
66. See, e.g., Michael B. Katz, Race, Poverty, and Welfare: Du Bois’s Legacy for Policy,
568 ANNALS 111 (2000).
67. See Rainwater, supra note 39, at 11. Rainwater correctly argues:
In fact, one of the most interesting sources of latent patterns should be in the gap
between the publicly accepted Theory and the actual structure found by an observer.
The Theory generates as its main result an object of public definition which we have
called a “way of life,” but which might be called in a more abstract vein the Theoretical
structure, or even the ideal structure . . . . [I]t will be called the Structure.
Id.
68. See Anthony Giddens, A Reply to My Critics, in SOCIAL THEORY OF MODERN SOCIETIES:
ANTHONY GIDDENS AND HIS CRITICS 249, 256 (David Held & John B. Thompson eds., 1989)
[hereinafter cited as Giddens, A Reply]. On the issue of whether social structure operates outside
of human agency, Anthony Giddens aptly writes:
In criticizing my viewpoint, [Zygmunt] Bauman and [John] Thompson, in somewhat
varying ways, pose the question: “what are the rules which comprise social structure?”;
but this is not a question which makes any sense in terms of the notion I have proposed.
I usually avoid using the term “social” structure, because this conforms too closely to
a position I want to avoid, in terms of which structure appears as something “outside”,
or “external”, to human action. In my usage, structure is what gives form and shape to
social life, but it is not itself that form and shape – nor should “give” be understood in
an active sense here, because structure only exists in and through the activities of human
agents.
Id.
69. OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 2.
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1391
create opportunities to “secure the ‘good life’ in whatever form is
needed—education, business, training, justice, health, comfort, and so on.”70 At
base, Oliver and Shapiro defined wealth and income in this manner not only
because they focused on racialized material inequality or poverty, but also
because they placed wealth accumulation in its historic context.71 In brief, Black
Wealth/White Wealth examined that manner in which America’s social systems
predicated wealth accumulation on racialized material inequality (or black
poverty).72
In Black Wealth/White Wealth, state policies and white supremacy operated
as “external,” objective reality, and in order to show why racialized material
inequality (i.e., racialized poverty) originated out of a larger, dominant social
narrative, one that still bears out present-day effects, Oliver and Shapiro analyzed
wealth accumulation in the three contexts: racialization of state policy, economic
detour, and sedimentations of racial inequality.73 By looking at racialized
material inequality in this context, they posited that wealth inequality flowed not
only from sedimentation, but also from failed black entrepreneurship. This
sedimentation and failure were birthed by state-sanctioned policies that favored
white over black. In this way, these three contexts underwrote wealth inequality
as officially sanctioned racialized state policies. Regardless of black-white
inequality, these policies concentrated vast wealth in very small numbers.
Ultimately, Oliver and Shapiro asserted forcefully that we must appreciate how
wealth inequality created two worlds,74 and without specific policies that will
help blacks, that create asset accumulation opportunities, and that secure racial
equality, we may face heightened conflict and social violence.75
In American Apartheid, Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton also
focused on “external,”objective reality when they studied poverty (i.e., the black
70. Id.
71. Id.
72. See Valerie Polakow, Savage Distributions: Welfare Myths and Daily Lives, in A NEW
INTRODUCTION TO POVERTY, supra note 35, at 241, 242-43. Polakow writes:
In 1993, 14.6 million children lived in poverty in the United States—nearly 9 million
white children, 4.9 million black children, and 3.1 million Latino children, according
to the Children’s Defense Fund. Although there are more white children actually living
in poverty, the child poverty rates are far higher for children of color (46.6 percent for
black children, 39.9 percent for Latino children, who may be of any race, and 16.9
percent for white children).
Id.
73. OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 3-5.
74. Id. at 3-5.
75. Id. at 10 (“We can choose to let racial inequality fester and risk heightened conflict and
violence. Americans can also make a different choice, a commitment to equality and to closing the
gap as much as possible.”); MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 235-36 (“If segregation is
permitted to continue, poverty will inevitably deepen and become more persistent within a large
share of the black community, crime and drugs will become more firmly rooted, and social
institutions will fragment further under the weight of deteriorating conditions.”).
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underclass). Like Oliver and Shapiro, they looked to social structure—white
racism and prejudice. Consider the Kerner Commission’s conclusion, which
Massey and Denton cited favorably: “white society is deeply implicated in the
ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintained it, and white
society condones it.”76 In this way, black underclass life originated not
necessarily from a culture of poverty,77 but more than likely from structural
mechanisms like residential segregation (e.g., “social isolation”).78 Put more
emphatically, Massey and Denton assert that “[r]esidential segregation is the
institutional apparatus that supports other racially discriminatory processes and
binds them together into a coherent and uniquely effective system of racial
subordination.”79 At base, without residential segregation, we would not have
black ghettos. As a social system, residential segregation forms an American
organizing principle that creates the urban underclass.80
In Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid, neither author
treated poverty and the black underclass as jurisprudential or theoretical
questions. They did not ask broad questions: “What is poverty?” or “Who
creates poverty?” Rather, they addressed: “Why racialized material inequality?”,
and “Why the rise and continuance of the black underclass?”81 Unfortunately,
Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid overlooked human agency.82
They implicitly rejected any notion that race consciousness fueled racialized
wealth inequality and residential segregation. As a result, we must peer into the
confined spaces between the data on which sociological treatments of poverty
have relied to find different answers, while avoiding the narrow arguments that
focus on morality, family structure, genetics, and social welfare policies.83 By
relegating dominant social structures and race consciousness to either
conservatives or to non-traditional approaches, Black Wealth/White Wealth and
American Apartheid more than suggest that “external,” objective reality like
white supremacy or white prejudice served as a better way to explain the
persistence of racialized wealth inequality and the black underclass. In so doing,
Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid constructed poverty so that
76. MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 4.
77. Id. at 3-5.
78. See Wilson, supra note 48, at 16 (“‘[S]ocial isolation’ does not mean cultural traits are
irrelevant in understanding behavior in highly concentrated poverty areas. Rather it highlights the
fact that culture is a response to social structural constraints and opportunities.”).
79. MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 8.
80. Id. at 9.
81. Id.
82. See Giddens, A Reply, supra note 68, at 256. Giddens, in arguing in favor of accounting
for human agency, writes: “‘Structure’ has no descriptive qualities of its own as a feature of social
life, because it exists only in a virtual way, as memory traces and as the instantiation of rules in the
situated activities of agents. . . . The structural properties of social systems, however, are not
themselves rules, and cannot be studied as rules.” Id.
83. See generally Gilder, supra note 47.
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we continually avoid asking different, difficult questions,84 inquiries that would
invite all of us to acknowledge that poverty exists because we believe in wealth
and poverty and because we believe a maldistribution of wealth so long as we
garner our personal chance to get rich.
Although these scholars avoid questions that I find more compelling, Black
Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid broaden our horizons on poverty
and residential segregation. While not jurisprudential, these scholars seek out the
etiology of racialized material inequality (i.e., poverty) and the black underclass
(i.e., urban poverty and residential segregation). Thus, when we consider both
books, we must conclude that Black Wealth/White Wealth and American
Apartheid occupy a special place in the sociological literature. Due to their
clarity of insight, their judicious use of data, and their narrative force, these
books should shift the manner in which we have traditionally discussed poverty
and the black underclass, thus giving us a new way to understand persistent
social problems—wealth inequality and residential segregation.
In so doing, Oliver and Shapiro in Black Wealth/White Wealth and Massey
and Denton in American Apartheid offer us a soberly woeful sociological tale.
It suggests that our laws may be insufficient.85 At present, federal statutes and
court rulings have barred many discriminatory practices.86 Yet, Oliver and
Shapiro illustrate how state-sponsored policies of racialized inequality and its
resulting sedimentation of inequality will at this juncture persist even if we
completely abandoned our conscious or unconscious racist practices.87 Equally
important, Massey and Denton reveal that racial segregation, the key to racialized
isolation for urban blacks, will persist because whites self-consciously engage in
practices that not only frustrate integration, but also make hypersegregation a
social reality.88 In Black Wealth/White Wealth, Oliver and Shapiro have clear
goals. They wish to help blacks. They wish to encourage policies that promote
asset accumulation opportunities at society’s bottom. Ultimately, they wish to
secure broad racial equality in the Twenty-first Century.89 In American
Apartheid, Massey and Denton urge us not only to commit to end black ghettos,
all of which symbolize the effect of racial oppression, but also to better enforce
the Fair Housing Act and to prosecute white racists vigorously when they harass
84. For legal literature on the social construction of gender, sexual identity, and disability,
see NANCY LEVIT , THE GENDER LINE : MEN, WOMEN, AND THE LAW (1998); John G. Culhane,
Uprooting the Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage, 20 CARDOZO L. REV. 1119 (1999); Robert
L. Hayman, Jr., Presumptions of Justice: Law, Politics, and the Mentally Retarded Parent, 103
HARV. L. REV. 1201 (1990).
85. See, e.g., United States v. McInnis, 976 F.2d 1226 (9th Cir. 1992).
86. See, e.g., Latimore v. Citibank, F.S.B., 979 F. Supp. 662 (N.D. Ill. 1997) (finding that
plaintiff failed to make out a prima facie case of lending discriminatory based on a real estate
appraisal that allegedly controlled for the racial composition of the neighborhood regardless of the
favorable comparables).
87. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 37-42.
88. See MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 10-11.
89. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 9.
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and intimidate blacks.90
In reviewing these books, I evaluate them separately, principally because
while they both ultimately study poverty, each book has a different analytical
focus. After this separate evaluation, I critically argue what I think is the central
difficulty with Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid. That is,
poverty and the underclass originate from social structures and institutional
practices, and these structures and practices exist in an “external,” objective
reality over which the people, regardless of race, unless the person happens to be
relatively rich and power, have little or no control. Without meaning power,
people, especially the poor, suffer constraints, all of which have their operating
source outside of a poor person’s purview. As a result, the poor live without
meaningful choices, and without choices, the poor cannot attain equal
opportunities not only for asset accumulation, but also for upward economic
mobility. In all of these structures and practices, neither sociologists accounts
for human agency, for the role of race consciousness, or for meaningful thinking,
talking, acting that informs, shapes, and influences not only what a person my
expect to experience, but also how she experiences the reality that only she can
absolutely co-create. Notwithstanding my critique, I endorse both books’
sociological mission and their aspirational goals for racial equality.91
In the end, these scholars essentially posited that poverty originated from
“external,” objective reality (i.e., social structural policies). In so doing, they
placed poverty beyond our personal control and outside of our human agency.
By illustrating how thinking and experience are inextricably linked, Black
Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid continue to construct poverty as
traditional sociological treatments of poverty have done in the past.
Unfortunately, we remain unaware that we co-create personal worlds and social
realities in which we victimized ourselves unwittingly, not violently with the
proverbial gun, but perennially with our minds.
B. Black Wealth/White Wealth: State-Sponsored Racialized
Wealth Inequality
1. The Centrality of Wealth over Income.—In Black Wealth/White Wealth,
Oliver and Shapiro clearly argue that black wealth inequality originates in
American Negro Slavery. It was in this state-sponsored institution that blacks
were exploited by the state and white masters not only for their labor, but also for
wealth maximization. After slavery, blacks fared little better, moving from de
jure enslavement to de facto discrimination. Reconstruction relieved some of the
odious black suffering, but it did not effectively end this inequality. At
Reconstruction’s demise, a Jim Crow world, backed by the state, denied blacks
equal treatment, trapping them in poverty. In addition to poverty, blacks had
90. See MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 217-18.
91. See generally Reginald Leamon Robinson, The Racial Limits of the Fair Housing Act:
The Intersection of Dominant White Images, the Violence of Neighborhood Purity, and the Master
Narrative of Black Inferiority, 37 WM. & MARY L. REV. 69 (1995).
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
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fewer opportunities than whites. It is not just the absence of social and economic
opportunities. Rather, it is the amassed wealth that whites acquired. During the
Jim Crow era, blacks could not have had equal asset accumulation opportunities.
With the aid of the Fair Housing Administration, the HOLC, and financial
institutions, whites acquired wealth producing assets like real property, and at the
same time, these federal agencies worked purposely to prevent blacks for living
in white neighborhoods. By not owning homes with equity, blacks were
negatively impacted. They could not use their homes to accumulate wealth.
Even if blacks owned homes, they could not maintain the home’s fair market
value and equity if banks refused to lend them money, especially for basic
upkeep and major improvements. And when banks did lend, they practiced
reverse redlining, forcing blacks to borrow at almost usurious rates from second
and tertiary lending markets. When they could not afford to pay, banks
foreclosed, forcing blacks to losing what asset accumulation could have been
gained by leveraging their homes. In the end, Oliver and Shapiro posited that it
is racialized state policies that permitted not all citizens but whites to maximize
their wealth.92
By looking critically at slavery, white suburbs, and institutionalize racism in
the banking industry,93 Oliver and Shapiro simply began to make clear their
focus: the fundamental material aspect of inequality.94 It is not the story that
blacks have not materially improved. Since 1930 to early 1970s, blacks have
made material gains. Civil rights also ushered in the end of legal segregation,
and as a result, blacks did improve their social station. Blacks also began to
graduate for high school at the same rate as whites. Blacks and whites shared
similar rates of attending college. However, since the mid-1970s, black college
enrollment declined.95 This decline correlated with 1970s economic shift, a
recession that impacted blacks harder that whites. This impact difference
revealed the value of Oliver and Shapiro’s wealth focus. Since the 1970s, black
economic gains have either deteriorated or stagnated. In addition to falling
behind white wealth accumulation, blacks still suffered higher unemployment
and residential segregation. Even if blacks had achieved income parity with
whites, they tended to live in overcrowded and substandard housing. These
persistent material differences move Oliver and Shapiro to conclude that full
equality did not exist between blacks and whites.96
In Black Wealth/White Wealth, Oliver and Shapiro mandated that full
equality must mean wealth equality. Full equality would help blacks; it would
promote equal asset accumulation opportunity for this nation’s bottom, no doubt
including poor blacks, whites, and others.97 Without full material equality,
blacks suffered wealth decline at steeper rates that do whites. Since the mid-
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 1-21.
See id. at 13-21.
See id. at 23.
Id. at 23-24.
Id. at 24-25.
Id. at 9.
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1970s, the story has been bleak for blacks. Prior to this period, blacks were wage
earners, but they simply were not accumulating wealth but earning incomes. And
while they could escape some of the worst aspect of urban poverty, they still
depended mainly on wage income. Accordingly, since the mid-1970s, with
corporations coping with a slowing world economy and seeking to cut production
costs, blacks faced slow wage growth and growing inequality between them and
whites. In addition to slowing wage growth, young black men lost their jobs at
a rate greater than young white men. As a result of this economic recession, the
material inequality between blacks and whites increased, allowing the rich to
reconcentrated wealth. During this period, the income gap between blacks and
whites increased. In addition, the state cut social programs, truly hurting the
already economically disadvantaged at society’s bottom. For Oliver and Shapiro,
this labor market and wage inequality cannot be explained by traditional culture
of poverty argument, in which natural difference account for poverty.98 They
also did not truly embrace the idea that the current welfare state can redress this
inequality.99 Regardless, since the mid-1970s, a weak economy exposed the core
effect of racialized state policies—the growing gap in black and white material
inequality.
Given the history of racialized state policies, Oliver and Shapiro recognize
that income studies will not enable us to promote full wealth equality between
black and white families.100 First, wages and salaries do not perforce become
immediate wealth.
Rather, they can create opportunities for asset
accumulation.101 For one reason, the top twenty percent received forty-three
percent of all income, and the nation’s poorest one-fifth earned about four
percent of the total income.102 Traditionally, sociologists and economists have
studied income when they wanted to measure well-being, social justice, and
equality.103 Although income has been historically unequally distributed, wealth
has been an even more unevenly distributed resource. Thus, we arrive at Black
Wealth/White Wealth’s analytical focal point—wealth. In studying wealth,
Oliver and Shapiro wished to show that not income but wealth created and
reinforced early racialized state policies,104 approaches that we designed to
benefit whites and to keep blacks economically dependent and financially
impoverished.105
98. Id. at 26-28.
99. See George, supra note 40, at 197-98.
100. See DALTON CONLEY, BEING BLACK, LIVING IN THE RED: RACE, WEALTH, AND SOCIAL
POLICY IN AMERICA 118 (1999) (“Given that the large differences in net worth by race appear to
overlay onto wealth disparities by family type, it is reasonable to suspect that assets may be playing
a causal role in generating black-white differences in family structure.”).
101. OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 31.
102. See id. at 29.
103. See id. at 29-30.
104. See id. at 37-45.
105. See id. at 176 (“The shadow of race falls darkly, however, on the black underclass, whose
members find themselves at the bottom of the economic hierarchy.”).
2001]
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1397
By starting with racialized state policies, Oliver and Shapiro linked wealth
to this nation’s historical economic oppression of blacks and other racial
minorities. In this regard, it would appear that Oliver and Shapiro’s Black
Wealth/White Wealth served as an excellent precursor to a reasonably palatable
reparations argument.106 Beyond this point, wealth and income differ. Wealth
meant a person’s total accumulated assets and access to resources. Wealth also
referred to a person’s net value of assets, viz., real estate, minus debt held at one
time. Fundamentally, wealth meant real or intangible asset of economic value
that can be brought, sold, traded, or invested, a thing that carried an economic
return. Income meant the flow of money like salaries and wages over a set
period, typically one year.107 Given this difference, Oliver and Shapiro proffered
three criticisms of income. First, only a presumed relationship existed between
income and wealth. Second, without data on wealth, income cannot reveal the
inequality of life chances between blacks and whites. Third, we can get wealth
data, and so we do not have to rely on income distributions. By looking beyond
income so that we can truly appreciate the degree to which racialized state
policies have benefitted whites, Oliver and Shapiro examined the implications
of studying wealth. While income allowed a person to manage day-to-day needs,
wealth granted a person not only income but also power, leisure, and
independence. While income has become an outgrowth of wealth so that a
person may invest in commercial and industrial ventures, wealth conferred power
on its owner,108 and with wealth, one could transfer assets from generation to
generation.109 This intergenerational transfer can ensure “economic outpatient
care”110 to beneficiaries and devisees.
106. See id. at 178 (suggesting that reparations talk following naturally as a “wholly defensible
strategy” for dealing with racialized wealth inequality, especially because this inequality originates
in the racialization of state policy that centered in and around slavery and Jim Crow practices). The
authors state:
Given the historical nature of wealth, monetary reparations are, in our view, an
appropriate way of addressing the issue of racial inequality. . . . This initial inequality
has been aggravated during each new generation, as the artificial head start accorded to
practically all whites has been reinforced by racialized state policy and economic
disadvantages to which only blacks have been subject. We can trace the sedimented
material inequality that now confronts us directly to this opprobrious past. Reparations
would represent both a practical and a moral approach to the issue of racial injustice.
Id. at 88. See also RANDALL ROBINSON, THE DEBT: WHAT AMERICA OWES TO BLACKS (2000);
Robert Westley, Many Billions Gone: Is It Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Reparations?,
40 B.C. L. REV. 429 (1998).
107. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 30.
108. STANLEY & DANKO, supra note 36, at 2 (“Wealth is not the same as income. If you make
a good income each year and spend it all, you are not getting wealthier. You are just living high.
Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend.”).
109. OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 32, 67-90.
110. See generally STANLEY & DANKO, supra note 36, at 175-219 (defining “economic
outpatient care” as intergenerational economic assistance from parents to children or beyond, and
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2. Racialization of State Policy and Wealth Inequality.—Even if the state
endorsed American Negro slavery and underwrote Jim Crow politics, how do we
explain current disparity in wealth accumulation between blacks and whites? In
address this question, Oliver and Shapiro critiqued “sedimentation of inequality”
and “economic detour.” As in the foregoing section, Oliver and Shapiro focused
on social systems, ones that favored whites over blacks, ones in which whites
easily retreated to violence, ones from which blacks lacked sufficient means of
escape. Alas, dominant social narrative not only determined historical
movement, but also dictated an end from well-drawn beginning.111
Do slavery’s economic privations and Jim Crow’s institutional racism
explains material equality between blacks and whites? In Black Wealth/White
Wealth, Oliver and Shapiro must address this question, and they do. They must
do so, especially if they advocated material equality. After reading this book, I
suspect that it served as a vanguard to a complex race/class analysis to
reparations talk.112 Anyway, by focusing on wealth, we can appreciate not only
racialized state policies that gave advantages to whites, but also placed this
wealth advantage in historical context. In this context, we can account for race,
class, and other historical factors, and in so doing, we avoid limiting our focus
on race or class. According to Oliver and Shapiro, race and class alone cannot
explain why whites have amassed more material wealth than blacks. By looking
to wealth as the predominant methodological vehicle for explaining wealth
inequality, Oliver and Shapiro targeted the source of racial inequality. With
wealth as their focal point, we can conclude that historical and structural factors
accounted for this wealth inequality between blacks and whites.113
Given the racialized state policies that involved not only slavery and Jim
Crow politics, but also white prejudice and racial segregation, what currently
positing that most ordinary citizens who become millionaires do not receive intergenerational
assistance).
111. See Peter Brooks, The Law as Narrative and Rhetoric, in LAW’S STORIES: NARRATIVE
AND RHETORIC IN THE LAW 14, 19 (Peter Brooks & Paul Gewirtz eds., 1996) (“For our literary
sense of how stories go together—of their beginnings, middles, and ends—may govern life as well
as literature more than [Alan Dershowitz] is willing to allow.”).
112. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 176. Oliver and Shapiro revealed this
complexity of race and class when they argued:
[O]ur investigation of wealth has revealed deeper, historically rooted economic
cleavages between the races than were previously believed to exist. The interaction of
race and class in the wealth accumulation process is clear. Historical practices, racist
in their essence, have produced class hierarchies that, on the contemporary scene,
reproduce wealth inequality. As important, contemporary racial disadvantages deprive
those in the black middle class from building their wealth assets at the same pace as
similarly situated white Americans. The shadow of race falls most darkly, however, on
the black underclass, whose members find themselves at the bottom of the economic
hierarchy.
Id.
113. See id. at 33-36, 127-70.
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1399
explains the material inequality between blacks and whites? Traditionally, one
could argue that socioeconomic factors like age, education, and income could
account for this material difference. Yet, Oliver and Shapiro disagreed. They
relied on SIPP wealth data, and after standardizing the data into four categories
and after eliminating households headed by those under age sixty-five, they
reached one conclusion: black and white income differences were insufficient
to “explain the large racial wealth gap.”114 Moreover, when blacks have incomes
and wealth near whites, they have less than one-half the net worth and net
financial assets of whites. As Oliver and Shapiro argued, blacks and whites
“with equal incomes possess very unequal shares of wealth. More so than
income, wealth holding remains very sensitive to the historically sedimenting
effects of race.”115
3. Economic Detour.—America frustrated black entrepreneurship,116
especially because private economic enterprises would threat existing white
interest. States adopted policies that created hostile economic climes in which
blacks had to grow their business, and by which blacks sought to survive and
feed their families.117 Thus, state policies that barred blacks from lucrative
markets, even though black businesses tried to provide services and goods
comparable to larger markets against which they were required to compete for
black consumers. With these barriers, blacks were required to take an “economic
detour.” Based on Merah Stuart’s 1940 work, he defined “economic detour.”
This [exclusion from the market] is not his preference. Yet it seems to
be his only recourse. It is an economic detour which no other racial
group in this country is required to travel. Any type of foreigner,
Oriental or “what not,” can usually attract to his business a surviving
degree of patronage of the native American. No matter that he may be
fresh from foreign shores with no contribution to the national welfare of
his credit; no matter that he sends every dollar of his American-earned
profit back to his foreign home . . . yet he can find a welcome place on
the economic broadway to America.118
According to Oliver and Shapiro, “[r]acist state policy, Jim Crow
segregation, discrimination, and violence have punctuated black entrepreneurial
efforts of all kinds. Blacks have faced levels of hardship in their pursuit of selfemployment that have never been experienced as fully by or applied as
consistently to other ethnic groups, even other nonwhite ethnics.”119 For
114. Id. at 100-01.
115. Id. at 101.
116. See id. at 45 (“In American society one of the most celebrated paths to economic selfsufficiency, both in reality and in myth, has been self-employment.”).
117. See id. at 4-5. “When businesses were developed that competed in size and scope with
white businesses, intimidation and ultimately, in some cases, violence were used to curtail their
expansion or get rid of them altogether.” Id. at 5.
118. Id. at 46-47.
119. Id. at 45.
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example, in the Red Record, Ida B. Wells Barnett chronicled how blacks were
lynched after they opened a general goods store across the street from a white
stores. Within no time, they prospered, and rather than compete more efficiently,
whites used trumped charges and a charged moment to gun down the three black
male owners.120 This postbellum era tale typified how black self-employment
faced hurdles well into the 1900s.121 In recent years, scholars have expressed
renew interest in the Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Black Wall Street,122 the Greenwood
residential and commercial district that whites destroyed based on the flimsiest
tale that a black man had attacked a white woman.123 Given the Jim Crow era in
which these ugly tales of white racial violence took place, it must be understood
that official state policies created hostile business environments for black selfemployment. They had to serve black markets. By restricting access to
mainstream markets, a denial that the state did not foist on whites and other
ethnic groups,124 black entrepreneurs had to settle for minorities markets that had
limited by size and resources. By restricting the degree to which black
businesses could expand and by constricting the financial stream into these
businesses, the state effectively limited “the wealth-accumulating ability of
African Americans.”125
For Oliver and Shapiro, we have the wrong image of black self-employment,
principally because racialized state policies and because successful ethnic
immigrants. Despite the racialization of state policies, blacks historically have
pursued self-employment, the road to economic independence and selfsufficiency. In fact, they worked like any other immigrant groups. Yet,
notwithstanding the hostility that they faced, immigrant groups were still
accorded better economic treatment than blacks by whites. In the traditional
literature, white scholars have looked favorably at Jewish and Japanese
immigrants, treating them as successful ethnic entrepreneurs. In this literature,
120. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 49 (“Black business success in [Wilmington and
Tulsa] both threatened white business competitors and provoked racial fears of poor whites.”); IDA
B. WELLS-BARNETT, ON LYNCHINGS (August Meier ed., 1969).
121. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 4.
122. See id. at 49.
123. See id. at 50.
124. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 46. Oliver and Shapiro effectively point out that:
Immigrant groups like the Japanese in California and the Chinese in Mississippi
responded to the societal hostility (e.g., discrimination) against them by immersing
themselves in small business enterprises. But unlike blacks, as John Butler states in his
Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black Americans, “they were able to enter the
open market and compete.” They faced few restrictions to commerce. They could
penetrate as much of a market as their economic capacity and tolerance for risk could
accommodate. They thus carved comfortable economic niches and were able to
succeed, albeit on a moderate scale.
Id.
125. Id. at 5.
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1401
these positive ethnics have been juxtaposed against black failure.126 The
literature treats blacks as “socially deficient and constitutionally impaired when
it comes to creating flourishing businesses.” Now, native blacks fare poorly
against new arriving immigrants from Cuba, Jamaica, and Korea.127
Notwithstanding these comparisons and the misunderstood history of black
self-employment, Oliver and Shapiro tied any spotty track record to racialized
state policies.128 First, they pointed out that blacks have succeeded despite such
policies. They illustrated this success by looking to Philadelphia and Cincinnati.
“In 1840 half of Cincinnati’s black population were freedman who had begun
acquiring property and building businesses. By 1852 they held a half million
dollars worth of property.”129 Second, black also created capital formation
opportunities. They formed mutual aid societies and “an independent black
banking system.” Unfortunately, these antebellum wealth-creating opportunities
suffered as “economic detour” arrived, producing laws that frustrated black
investment opportunities, that denied blacks access to the stock market, and that
prevented blacks and former slaves from practicing their artisan skills as a
trade.130 Nevertheless, between 1867 to 1917, blacks still pursued selfemployment, even though they were relegated to providing goods and services
to an all black clientele.131 In the 1940s, blacks prospered commercially and
financially in Durham, North Carolina.132 Whether the spotty success of black
businesses, they threatened whites, and invariably racial conflict destroyed early
foundations for wealth accumulation. After the Wilmington Riots of 1898 and
the Tulsa Riots of 1921, white businesses filled the commercial void, effectively
benefitting from racialized state policies that encouraged not only violence and
massacre, but also market restrictions and legal constraints. In the end, Oliver
and Shapiro would correctly argue that deeply rooted (or sedimented) racial
ignorance, fear, and hatred undermined black self-employment by detouring them
from lucrative mainstream markets and from equal wealth maximizing
opportunities.
4. Sedimentation of Wealth Inequality.—For Oliver and Shapiro,
sedimentation of inequality analytically grounded their claim that blacks cannot
reach material parity with whites. As such, it is not enough that Oliver and
Shapiro clearly showed that the middle class and the wage earning class
possessed vastly different amounts of material wealth.133 For example, they
126. But see, e.g., KATHERINE S. NEWMAN, NO SHAME IN MY GAME: THE WORKING POOR IN
THE INNER CITY (1999).
127. See, e.g., MARY C. WATERS, BLACK IDENTITIES: WEST INDIAN IMMIGRANT DREAMS AND
AMERICAN REALITIES (1999).
128. OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 48 (“The overwhelming odds that black business
owners faced render all the more resounding the victories that they were able to achieve.”).
129. Id. at 47.
130. Id. at 48.
131. See id.
132. See id. at 49.
133. See id. at 67-90.
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stated that the “top 1 percent of America’s families control two-thirds of the
wealth. The top 1 percent collected over 4 times their proportionate share of
income, but hold over 11 times their share of net worth and over 11 times their
share of the net financial assets.”134 Although it is not clear why Oliver and
Shapiro used “their share,” it is clear that the middle class lacked the same
financial assets of the elite economic cohort.135 They must also then argue that
despite this very precarious state of the middle class, the wealth difference
between blacks and whites was staggering. They did, and it was a tale of two
nations, one in which the black middle class rested on an economic footing that
was precarious, marginal, and fragile.136 This poor economic footing depended
not on financial assets but on income. As such, the black middle class’s net
worth rested on home equity because the income-dependent and white-collar
middle class only controlled petty financial assets (e.g., a car). “Without wealth
reserves, especially liquid assets, the black middle class depends on income for
its standard of living. Without the asset pillar, in particular, income and job
security shoulder a greater part of the burden.”137 It was the white-collar
occupations that disclosed real inequality. The “black middle class owns fifteen
cents for every dollar owned by the white middle class.”138 Owing to this
difference, whites can survive longer with a sudden income lost.139 Although
1984 blacks owned three percent of all the accumulated wealth and received 7.6
percent of the total money earned, making up eleven percent of the households,
the black-white wealth inequality still remained.140
Can sedimentation of inequality explain this wealth gap? If we would begin
with slavery and Jim Crow politics, Oliver and Shapiro contended that blacks
cannot close this wealth gap. This inequality sediment carried with it a
cumulative effect. It cemented blacks at our society’s material bottom. They
134. Id. at 68-69.
135. Id. at 70. Of the three middle-class groups, income-determined, college-educated, and
occupationally-defined, Oliver and Shapiro argue that:
[T]he income-determined middle class possesses $39,700 in net worth and $5,399 in net
financial assets. It also surveys the capacity of net financial reserves to support (1)
present middle-class living standards and (2) poverty living standards. In the event of
a financial nightmare in which incomes were suddenly shut off, families in the incomedefined middle class could support their present living standards out of existing
financial resources for only two months. They could endure at the poverty level [of
$968.00 per month] for 5.6 months.
Id.
136. See id. at 92-93.
137. Id. at 95.
138. Id. According to Oliver and Shapiro, “[w]hen one defines the middle class as those with
college degrees, the most numerically restrictive definition, one finds that the white middle class
commands $19,000 more [net financial assets]; using the broadest definition, white-collar
occupations, the white middle class controls nearly $12,000 more.” Id.
139. See id. at 97.
140. See id. at 97-98.
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1403
argued: “Wealth is one indicator of material disparity that captures the historical
legacy of low wages, personal and organizational discrimination, and
institutional racism.”141 Best efforts notwithstanding, black wealth inequality
represented the present-effects of historic black oppression. Even when blacks
attempted to work as entrepreneur, whites used intimidation, violence, and the
law to deny them access to mainstream markets, the income source on which
immigrant classes have depended.142 In this way, whites denied black capital
formation on which a prosperous black middle could have been built.143 More
than organized violence, sediment inequality structurally advantaged whites over
blacks. For example, in the 1940, the Federal Housing Administration (“FHA”)
privileged white home owning interest in a way that relegated, as Massey and
Denton point out, blacks to urban ghettos. Oliver and Shapiro described the
consequential inequality of sediment wealth: the “postwar generation of whites
whose parents gained a foothold in the housing market through the FHA will
harvest a bounteous inheritance in the years to come.”144
Coupled with intergenerational asset transfers and the re-concentration of
wealth in the 1980s, sediment inequality will remain a damaging, if not a lagging,
element for wealth equality between blacks and whites. Slavery denied blacks
any right to control their economic destiny. Jim Crow vanquished any hope
raised by the post-Civil War Amendments that blacks could rely on legal
equality, self-help, and entrepreneurial ingenuity to accumulate financial assets.
Beginning in the 1940s, the FHA, HOLC, and financial institutions worked
collectively to institutionalize not only white privilege but also racialized net
worth and net financial assets.145 Organized violence gave effect to other tools
like restrictive covenants and associations that could not get blacks out of
traditionally all-white neighborhoods. With the Internal Revenue Code, whites
could exploit equity, a liquidity that they could use to ensure educational
opportunities for their children.146 Given this wealth advantage, whites could
much more easily survive the economic contraction of the mid-1970s. In the
141. Id. at 5.
142. See id. at 45-50.
143. See id. at 47-48.
144. Id. at 49-50.
145. See id. at 136-47 (discussing the continuing problem of lending discrimination, interest
rate differentials based on race, credit worthiness, and home equity appreciation disparity based on
neighborhoods and race).
146. Id. at 153. Oliver and Shapiro observed:
Wealth used thus to enhance a child’s “cultural capital” helps provide a good start in life
and can lay a good deal of the groundwork for financial success and independence later
on. People often told us about the schooling, weeks at camp, after-school classes and
sport, trips, and other experiences that they had enjoyed as kids and wanted to provide
for their children. All parents pass along cultural capital to their offspring. Of the
common enrichment that parents can provide, education is the most expensive, and it
is where we found the most differences.
Id.
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1960s and later, blacks who needed additional support relied on social welfare,
and in order for blacks to qualify as the deserving poor, AFDC (Aid for
Dependents with Children) required that blacks deplete their assets (e.g.,
savings). For Oliver and Shapiro, four factors linked racialized state policies and
sedimentation of wealth inequality.
From the era of slavery on through the failure of the freedman to gain
land and the Jim Crow laws that restricted black entrepreneurs,
opportunity structures for asset accumulation rewarded whites and
penalized blacks. FHA policies then thwarted black attempts to get in
on the ground floor of home ownership, and segregation limited their
ability to take advantage of the massive equity build-up that whites have
benefited from in the housing market. As we have also seen, the formal
rules of government programs like social security and AFDC have had
discriminatory impacts on black Americans. And finally, the U.S. tax
code has systematically privileged whites and those with assets over and
against asset-poor black Americans.147
Given this difference, blacks do not have assets to bequeath (e.g., money and
personal property) or to devise (i.e., real property) to successive generations, and
thus they cannot achieve upward class mobility equal to whites. In the end,
sedimentation represented the weight of history that undermines efforts to create
racialized wealth equality.
C. American Apartheid: Persistent Racial Segregation and Spatially
Concentrated Poverty
Does racial segregation, as an institutional practice, explain not only the rise
but also the persistence of the black ghetto? In American Apartheid, Massey and
Denton answer this question affirmatively and clearly. Racial segregation
explains these residential and economic conditions.148 Yet, we must
acknowledge, as does Massey and Denton, that racial segregation has many
social and historical layers. Nevertheless, for Massey and Denton, racial
segregation constitutes the essential way to explain not only the origins of dark
ghettos,149 but also precursor to hypersegregation. In presenting the manner in
which Massey and Denton carefully and analytically argue this major premise,
I will proceed along the following sociological path: how whites constructed
black ghettos,150 how the ghetto persists in a racist society,151 how social
structures contribute to the continuing causes of segregation,152 how social
147.
148.
149.
150.
151.
152.
Id. at 174.
See generally MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **.
See generally KENNETH B. CLARK, DARK GHETTO: DILEMMAS OF SOCIAL POWER (1965).
See MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 74-78.
See id.
See id. at 83-114.
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1405
structures create underclass communities,153 how social structures perpetuate the
underclass,154 how federal public policy fails to eradicate hypersegregation,155
and how social structures open communities and eliminate discrimination from
public life.156
1. Constructing the Black Ghetto.—What constructed the black ghetto?
Likewise, who constructed the black ghetto, from which even middle-class blacks
cannot escape? In American Apartheid, Massey and Denton provides us with a
clearly structural answer: white racism. And white racism expresses itself in this
context as racial segregation. Keep in mind that racial segregation represents a
complex problem. That is, racial segregation explains the intense isolation and
extreme spatial concentration of black poverty. By poverty, they mean
underclass status, and by spatial concentration, they mean ghettos, an idea that
simply comes to mean that one racial group lives almost exclusively in a given
geographic area. For Massey and Denton, racial segregation centers the problem
of black poverty for a number of reasons, and it is their point to show how
persistent racial segregation links itself inextricably with racially discriminatory
practices that were specifically designed to create intense racial isolation, viz.,
black ghettos.
First, before 1900, racial segregation did not exist, and therefore we had to
construct the ghetto. Although one could identify neighborhood in which blacks
lived, few areas existed in which blacks exclusively lived. During this time,
blacks and whites, living most in the South, shared common social worlds,
“spoke a common language, shared a common culture, and interacted personally
[and regularly].”157 After the Civil War, black-white living patterns changed not
only because slavery no longer defined social roles, but also because employment
patterns drove blacks into very poor housing stock. Nevertheless, while masterslave relationship were destroyed by the Civil War Amendments, the boss and
worker moved relatively seamlessly into its place, and blacks and whites still
maintained unequal but direct personal contact with each other.158
Supported by complex social forces, racial segregation begins with black
ghettos. In the south, Jim Crow politics and violence did not immediately
mandate that blacks live in ghettos. In the north, whites needed black ghettos.
Immigrant ghettos existed, but they were not exclusively Irish or Italian. As their
numbers increased, whites, newly arriving immigrants too, felt ill at ease. If
industrial captains’ use of black workers as strike breakers did not heighten white
hostility and fear, then their increasingly large number certainly did. Southern
out-migration drove them north. Newspapers added to the suspicion by printing
retelling of black crimes and vices. Violence like the St. Louis Riot deepened the
racial divide, and soon blacks faced hard times when they sought education, jobs,
153.
154.
155.
156.
157.
158.
See id. at 115-47.
See id. at 148-85.
See id. at 186-216.
See id. at 217-36.
Id. at 17-18, 19-26.
See id. at 26.
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and housing. Not just poor but rich blacks too faced this color-line and violence,
and it was increasingly white violence that drove blacks from white
neighborhoods. Among more civilized whites, they rejected violence in favor of
voluntary associations, zoning ordinances, boycotts, deed restrictions, and
restrictive covenants.159 With the ruling in Buchanan v. Warley,160 local
ordinances were ruled unconstitutional, and with Shelley v. Kraemer,161
restrictive covenants suffered the same fate.162
Nevertheless, local real estate board adopted tactics to frustrate racial
integration, and then they found ways to profit from it by engaging in
“blockbusting.” While these rulings slowed the rate at which social factors
constructed black ghettos, white racist tactics and structural factors were still at
work in the north and south, keeping pace with economic factors like
industrialization and urban development patterns.163
Until post-WW II, America’s white racism arrayed formidable barriers like
violence and neighborhood improvement associations to prevent blacks were
integrating all white neighborhoods.164 However, after WWII, a new structural
barrier denied blacks access to single-family homes as well as better
neighborhood with descent housing. Under this new structural barrier, private
industry allied itself with the federal government. According to Massey and
Denton, this structural alliance responded eagerly to white demands for new
homes. Private industry built new homes, and whites bought with loan programs
from the Federal Housing Administration (“FHA”) and the Veterans
Administration (“VA”). White cars, new highways pulled whites as well as
industry out of the cities.165 In addition to federal authorities, institutionalized
racism within the real estate associations meant that real estate agents worked
comfortably with white homeowners who did not wish to sell to blacks and who
preferred to live in all white neighborhoods.166 Financial institutions like banks
and savings and loan associations frustrated integrationists blacks by denying
them loans. Basically, between 1940 and 1970, institutionalized racism operated
not only with federal authorities and financial institutions, but also within local
real estate boards and urban housing markets.167
If institutional racism within federal authorities, financial institutions, and
urban housing markets worked to undermine an integration principle, they
159. See id. at 26-37.
160. 245 U.S.60 (1917).
161. 334 U.S. 1 (1948).
162. See MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 41-42.
163. See id. at 40-41.
164. See id. at 42-43.
165. See id. at 43-45.
166. See id. at 48-50 (“In their personal view, the realtors studied by Helper appeared to share
the prejudices of their white clients. Some 59% of her respondents rejected racial integration in
principle, and 84% espoused an ideological stance that supported the exclusion of blacks from
white neighborhoods.”).
167. See id. at 50-51.
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1407
equally labored to force blacks into urban ghettos. In the 1930s, the federal
government developed programs like Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC),
which increased home ownership by refinancing urban mortgages near default
status and by granting low interest low to foreclosed owners so that they could
regain their lost property. And the HOLC instituted “redlining” practices that
made loans based on four risk categories,168 but the central risk was racial
integration. Like the HOLC, the FHA’s Underwriting Manual favored “stable”
neighborhoods, a proxy for same class, all white homeowners.
Accordingly, black neighborhoods or working class neighborhoods that
bordered on black settlements were consistently placed in the fourth category and
redlined. An HOLC private confidential reported concerned itself with
expanding black population and maintaining fair market values. The HOLC
influenced how lending institutions made loans by sharing their “Residential
Security Map” with the industry, and without the benefit of FHA and VA
loans,169 the ever growing black population could not effectively leave densely
occupied black neighborhoods.170 And once they were locked into black ghettos,
banks divested themselves from these communities so that blacks could not
acquire loans for basic home repairs, and once in disrepair, black homes lost their
value, affecting their ability to sell their homes.171 In the 1950s, these
institutional practices led to urban decline and white flight. In response, urban
renewal (or Negro removal) program would end black ghettos through public
housing; yet, this program eliminated housing stock and displaced citizens. In
the end, it created federally sponsored “second ghettos.”172 In effect, when we
couple these practices with urban renewal programs and the 1960s urban riots,
the HOLC and other major institutions formed the basis on which the Kerner
Commission emphatically declared that among other factors, social and economic
problems flowed from racial segregation.173 Enter the Fair Housing Act of
1968.174
Despite the 1968 Act, racial segregation still continues virtually unabated,175
168. Id. at 51. According to Massey and Denton,
Four categories of neighborhood quality were established, and lowest was coded with
the color red; it and the next-lowest category virtually never received HOLC loans. The
vast majority of mortgages went to the top two categories, the highest of which included
areas that were “new, homogenous, and in demand in good times and bad” (to HOLC
this meant areas inhabited by “American business and professional men”); the second
category consisted of areas that had reached their peak, but were still desirable and
could be expected to remain stable.
Id.
169.
170.
171.
172.
173.
174.
175.
Id. at 51-55.
See id. at 41-49.
See id. at 54-55.
Id. at 55-57.
See id. at 57-59.
See id. at 192-200.
See id. at 96-109.
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and Massey and Denton posit that racial discrimination must be its primary
cause. Whites dispreferred to live with a large percent of blacks, and blacks
prefer integrated communities. Accordingly, “when a black family moves into
a formally all-white neighborhood, at least one white family’s tolerance threshold
is exceeded, causing it to leave.”176 Unfortunately, once whites leave, black
homeowners replace them, and rather than leading to an integrated community,
the all-white neighborhood becomes a black one. Massey and Denton describe
Thomas Schelling’s failed integration model.
Given strong black preferences for integrated housing, this departing
white family is likely to be replaced by a black family, pushing the black
percentage higher and thereby exceeding some other family’s tolerance
limit, causing it to leave and be replaced by another black family, which
violates yet another white family’s preferences, causing it to exit, and so
on.177
Yet, Massey and Denton argued that Schelling’s model failed to account for the
social structural mechanism that internalized active white prejudice. That is,
whites can only abandon no longer all-white neighborhoods if they can escape
to another still all-white neighborhoods. In addition to white prejudice and
intolerance, what mechanism kept blacks out of newly created all-white
communities? Besides structural forces like the real estate market, one
mechanism is violence. White racist attitudes, all-white neighborhoods, and
perceptions inferior blacks correlate to produce violence.178 In some cases, these
three factors have combined to create Section 3631 violations, some of which the
federal government successfully prosecuted.179 Yet, even if we do not experience
intimidating violence or disinviting notices like “No Niggers Allowed,” whites
rely on subtle mechanisms like discouraging smiles or attitudes.180 Whites will
often lie or deceive interested blacks, or they will steer them to other
neighborhoods.181 In the 1980s, housing audits discovered how pervasive
housing discrimination remained for blacks.182 And when banks dry up credit if
they perceive a neighborhood as unstable (e.g., transitioning from all-white to
integrated), or if they deny credit to whites who wish to live in racially-integrated
176. Id. at 96.
177. Id.
178. See generally Robinson, supra note 91, at 69.
179. See id. at 144-55.
180. See, e.g., Reginald Leamon Robinson, White Cultural Matrix and the Language of
Nonverbal Advertising in Housing Segregation: Toward an Aggregate Theory of Liability, 25 CAP.
U. L. REV. 101 (1996).
181. See MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 97-98.
182. See id. at 99-107. “One developer working near Chicago’s South Side black community
refused to deal with blacks at all: blacks were always told that no properties were available, even
though 80% of whites were shown real estate. In the same 1988 study, realtors told 92% of whites
that apartments were available but gave this information to only 46% of blacks.” Id.
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1409
communities, then social institutions structurally resegregate neighborhoods.183
After facing these obvious and subtle structural forces, blacks abandon their
desire to purchase a home.184
And even when blacks don’t abandon their quest to find suitable housing
stock outside of the black ghetto, they will more than likely not find a raciallymixed neighborhood. Blacks are more racially segregated that any other racial
group. This segregation rises to such a level of intensity that Massey and Denton
describes this social phenomenon as “hypersegregation.”185 Hypersegregation
has five dimensions: unevenness (blacks over- or underrepresentation in
neighborhoods; isolation (blacks rarely share neighborhoods with whites);
clustered (blacks form one large contiguous enclave or scattered site housing);
concentrated (blacks live in a very small area or settle sparsely throughout an
urban environ); and centralized (blacks live in a spatially focused area around an
urban core or along its periphery).186 Blacks live in segregated neighborhoods
on these five dimensions simultaneously.187 As a result, blacks cannot exit from
these communities; or at least, they cannot escape into integrated communities.
Using tactics of the post-WWII era, whites use discriminatory practices to keep
blacks out of their neighborhood, and whites refuse to live near black
neighborhoods. At the very least, by conjoining these discriminatory practices
and an unwillingness to live with blacks, white racial prejudice effectively
reproduces the black ghetto. What keeps blacks in these neighborhoods is white
racism, structural mechanisms, and institutional practices.188 In the end,
hypersegregation means that black ghetto will spatially organize black urban
living.189
According to Massey and Denton, the structural factor that underlies the
constructing of the black ghetto is white racial prejudice, a racially
discriminatory attitude that finds support in existing institutional mechanisms.190
In this way, unlike Oliver and Shapiro wrote relied on a race/class critique of
racial material inequality, Massey and Denton posit that race explains continuing
residential segregation more than class.191 “When it comes to housing and
residential patterns, therefore, race is the dominant organizing principle. No
matter what their ethnic origin, economic status, social background, or personal
characteristics, African Americans continue to be denied full access to U.S.
183. See id. at 105-08.
184. See id. at 109.
185. Id. at 74.
186. See id.
187. See id. at 74-78.
188. See id. 81-82.
189. See id. at 144 (“But then as now, the persistence of racial segregation in the housing
market has meant that middle-class blacks are less able to isolate themselves from the poor than the
middle classes of other groups. As a result, middle-class blacks live in much poorer neighborhoods
than do middle-class whites, Hispanics, or Asians.”).
190. See id. at 109-14.
191. See id. at 84-96.
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housing markets. . . . The end result is that blacks remain the most spatially
isolated population in U.S. history.”192
2. The Rise and Persistence of the Black Underclass.—For Massey and
Denton, institutional racism gave rise to the black underclass, and this social
phenomenon persists today because institutional forces still operate against
minorities. As Massey and Denton aptly pointed out in American Apartheid,
racial segregation represents the endpoint of concerted institutional racism to
deny blacks access to all white neighborhoods, and this institutional practice was
to be ameliorated by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. By 1973, it was clear that the
Act was failing. Yet, despite this Act and its later reforms, we can still
comfortably conclude that American remains a racially segregated nation.193
Given the depths to which white prejudice pervades institutional practices and
socio-structural mechanisms, residential segregation remains not only an extant
social problem, but also the etiology for the black underclass.
Therefore, in addressing the origins and persistence of the black underclass,
we must as Massey and Denton does look to the black ghetto. In it, we find root
causes, sources that originate outside of the black community, sources that are
structural and institutional in nature. After 1973, any increase in poverty gave
rise to economic divestment. Contractions turned into extreme privations.
“Joblessness, welfare dependency, and single parenthood become the norm, and
crime and disorder are inextricably woven into the fabric of daily life.”194
Yet, Massey and Denton insist that the rise and persistence of the black
underclass grew out of deliberate structural and institutional policies. First, I will
address the rise of the black underclass, and then I discuss why in Massey and
Denton’s estimation it persists. First, by isolating blacks, even at very low
segregation levels, the neighborhood environment immediately deteriorates.
Moreover, blacks experience greater levels of poverty in racially segregated
neighborhoods. In all black neighborhoods, all blacks suffer high levels of
poverty. Yet, “one-third of whites who live in all-white neighborhoods
experience the lower white poverty rate of [ten percent].”195
Another factor in the rise of the black underclass is race and class
segregation. How does these kinds of segregation contribute to the making of the
black underclass? According to Massey and Denton, racial segregation
concentrates black into small spatial areas, and this concentration raises poverty
to which blacks will be exposed. It correspondingly lowers the interpersonal
contact between blacks and whites. “By itself, racial segregation concentrates
poverty in black neighborhoods, but the addition of class segregation
concentrates poverty primarily in poor black neighborhoods. By adding class
segregation to the simulation exercise, we exacerbate the degree of poverty
concentration that is imposed on poor blacks because of racial segregation.”196
192.
193.
194.
195.
196.
Id. at 114.
See id. at 200-12.
Id. at 118.
Id. at 122.
Id. at 124.
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1411
However, Massey and Denton stress that race makes for concentrated black
neighborhood isolation and poverty. Class heightens and reinforces what white
racism and institutional structures make and sustain.197 As Massey and Denton
conclude:
[R]acial segregation concentrates poverty, and it does so without anyone
having to move anywhere. With or without class segregation, residential
segregation between blacks and whites builds concentrated poverty into
the residential structure of the black community and guarantees that poor
blacks experience a markedly less advantaged social environment than
do poor whites.198
In creating black underclass, we must see how racial segregation correlates with
other existing structural factors like housing abandonment and crime interact
with poverty rates. To this degree, racial segregation conjoins with selfperpetuating downward spirals. As such, all critical factors interact, each feeding
and reinforcing the others, so that when one landlord divests from a poor,
working-class neighborhoods, others quickly follow suit. For example, let’s
consider a working-class neighborhood begins to experience a transition from
white to black. Prior to the transition, this neighborhood may be well maintained
by owners and residents. Yet, if the newcomers have less income, then
homeowners may have fewer resources for building maintenance. Other
landlords may follow suit. Unkept yards soon share company with physical
disrepairs like peeling paint. Dilapidated buildings signal economic defections,
and then the downward spiral may become meteoric. Small economic decisions
yield broad spectrum and negative results. “At some point, a threshold is
crossed, beyond which the pattern becomes self-reinforcing and irreversible.”199
If the city becomes a totally segregated one, then blacks become trapped in
neighborhoods which lacks an economic infrastructure, so that service outlet
decline, so that joblessness rises, so that vacant lots predominate, so that social
order will breakdown, so that black-on-black crime becomes commonplace,
crime and dangerous, and so that children abandon their childhoods.200
D. Racialized Wealth Inequality and the Black Underclass:
Structural Inequality and Institutionalized Segregation
In Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid, structural barriers
and institutional policies explain racialized wealth inequality and the black
underclass. Neither treatment of poverty broadly recognized any role by the
individual.201 And when Oliver and Shapiro and Massey and Denton introduced
197. See id. at 125-30.
198. Id. at 125.
199. Id. at 130.
200. See id. at 132-39.
201. Cf. Pierre Schlag, The Problem of the Subject, 69 TEX. L. REV. 1627, 1628-29 (1991)
(“This forgetting of the “we” who do the “expounding,” this bracketing of the ‘I’—in short, this
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an individual actor, they appeared to do so to illustrate specifically and perhaps
emotionally how people sought a way out of poverty, only to have the larger,
white race dominated system thwart their every, innovative approach. In the end,
structural inequality and institutional segregation, all “external,” objective
realities over which the mere human agent has absolutely no control, explain
racialized wealth inequality202 and the persisted black underclass.203
Recall how Oliver and Shapiro pointed to the manner in which the racialized
state policy mandated that black self-employment take an “economic detour” so
that black business could not have a sustained impact on white enterprises.
Likewise, the sedimented nature of this wealth inequality, especially because it
had been cemented by racialized policies, meant that even if blacks have actually
specifically succeeded, they could, and still cannot, close the gap between black
income and white wealth.204 Why? For Oliver and Shapiro, critical structural
opportunities may no longer exist so that even with Herculean efforts, black may
still not achieve relative parity with white wealth.205
Equally important, when Oliver and Shapiro gave us different opportunities
to understand the role that individual might play in creating wealth opportunities
for themselves, they do so in a manner that reinforced that structural barrier may
prove too impenetrable for blacks, unless they have acquired a degree of access
to wealth making opportunities that have intergenerational origins.206 Keep in
mind that these intergenerational origins meant that they fathers or grandfathers
had wealth and they passed it along to the next generation. It must follow still
that racialized state policies gave whites grander opportunities, especially owing
eclipse of the problem of the subject--became a vital, pervasive, constitutive characteristic of
American legal thought. Indeed, American legal thought has been conceptually, rhetorically, and
socially constituted to avoid confronting the question of who or what thinks or produces law.”)
(emphasis added).
202. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 22 (“White families who were able to secure title
to land in the nineteenth century were much more likely to finance education for their children,
provide resources for their own or their children’s self-employment, or secure their political rights
through political lobbies and the electoral process.”).
203. See MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **.
204. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 12-13. They write:
Disparities in wealth between blacks and whites are not the product of haphazard events,
inborn traits, isolated incidents or solely contemporary individual accomplishments.
Rather, wealth inequality has been structured over many generations through the same
systematic barriers that have hampered blacks throughout their history in American
history: slavery, Jim Crow, so-called de jure discrimination, and institutional racism.
205. See id. at 5 (“the same social system that fosters the accumulation of private wealth for
many whites denies it to blacks, thus forging an intimate connection between white wealth
accumulation and black poverty.”).
206. See id. at 7 (“Segregation created an extreme situation in which earlier generations were
unable to build up much, if any, wealth. . . . Until the 1960s there were few older African
Americans with the ability to save much at all, much less invest. And so savings and no inheritance
meant no wealth.”).
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1413
to slavery and Jim Crow, which entrenched white wealth at level to which only
the rarest black entrepreneur might reach. Given the history of racialized state
policies and the systematic sedimented inequality, blacks cannot pass wealth to
successive generations.207 In brief, the racialization of state policy persists as a
key factor that must explain why blacks (and poor whites) cannot attain equal
wealth accumulation opportunities.208
Oliver and Shapiro did introduce human agency, and in so doing, they
reinforced their initial premise: racialized state policy (i.e., institutional racism)
fostered structural climates in which poor blacks suffer even when they sought
to better themselves. For example, Oliver and Shapiro looked at “reserve
redlining.”209 This predatory lending practice targets poor, often semi-illiterate
minorities or the elderly, “guiding” them into borrowing terms that trap them
deeper into urban ghettos and perhaps underclass status. These borrowers face
severe risk, one of which may mean losing their home.210 Oliver and Shapiro
highlighted the Reagan’s administration weakening of banking regulations. They
focused on “strip-mining minority neighborhoods of housing equity.” They cited
favorably civil right activists who declared that small, unregulated finance
companies “rape” minority communities. And in so doing, they raised minorities
to the surface of their text as human only so that they can effectively illustrate
that poor black live not like subject but like object on which larger, structural
forces come to bear.211 Consider Oliver and Shapiro’s recounting of the Christine
Hill story.
It started with a leaky roof and ended in personal bankruptcy,
foreclosure, and eviction. Using Hill’s home as collateral, the lender
charged interest that, according to Rob Well’s piece in the 10 January
1993 Chicago Tribute “made double-digit pawnshop rates look like
bargains.” The Hills couldn’t pay. The lender was a small and
unregulated mortgage firm, similar to those often chosen by low-income
207. See id. at 151-50 (“[W]e argued that a plethora of state policies from slavery through the
mid-twentieth century crippled the ability of blacks to gain a foothold in American society. Owing
to their severely restricted ability to accumulate wealth combined with massive discrimination in
the private sector and general white hostility, black parents over several generations were unable
to pass any appreciable assets on to their kin.”).
208. See id. at 12-13.
209. Id. at 21 (“Senator Donald Riegle of Michigan in announcing a Senate Banking
Committee hearing on abuse in home equity and second mortgage lending pointed to ‘reverse
redlining.’ This means providing credit in low-income neighborhoods on predatory terms and
‘taking advantage of unsophisticated borrowers.’”). See also Darnellena Christie Burnett, Justice
in Housing: Curbing Predatory Lending, NAT’L B. ASS’N MAG., Mar.-Apr. 2001, at 14-15, 21-22.
210. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 21 (“Families lost their homes or were facing
foreclosure in over three-quarters of the cases. Only fifty-five of the 406 families still possessed
their homes and did not face foreclosure. The study also showed that the maps of redlined areas
and high-interest loans overlapped.”).
211. See id. at 20-21.
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borrowers because mainstream banks consider them too poor or
financially unstable to qualify for a normal bank loan.212
Undoubtedly, larger, structural forces did operate in the Hills story, and they had
to experience a loss, both personal and emotional. Yet, Oliver and Shapiro
presented the Hills as if they lacked any agency, as if they bore absolutely no
responsibility for the manner in which they entered into this predatory experience
and in which they internalized their experience. Oliver and Shapiro proffered a
suggestion that could inform how we might understand the Hills’ experience:
“The attorney representing some of [the approximately twenty thousand other
low-income Georgian homeowners] is quoted in Well’s Tribute article as saying:
‘This is a system of segregation, really. We don’t have separate water fountains,
but we have separate lending institutions.’”213
Throughout Black Wealth/White Wealth, Oliver and Shapiro provided
individual case history so that we can easily view larger, structural forces at play.
In the Hills’ case, the larger, structural forces denied them equal access to
mainstream lending institutions where they would arguably not pay usurious
borrowing rates, and where they would have an equal chance to repair their home
or borrow against its equity. By borrowing from secondary lending markets, they
suffered a dismal fate, one that Oliver and Shapiro no doubt could have easily
predicated, in which the Hills lose their home and lose their personal property
through bankruptcy. Without a home that the Hills could leverage to fund their
children’s education, they by perforce must run the risk of losing a generation.
Yet, Oliver and Shapiro did point out that material inheritance takes at least three
forms: cultural capital, advanced inheritance, and bequeathed assets.214 While
blacks have received meager help from their parents, viz., $3000, when they buy
homes,215 whites got levels of financial assistance that for Oliver and Shapiro
must have flowed a history of unequal material accumulation opportunities, viz.,
larger, structural forces.
Consider the impact of individual inheritance choices, all of which flowed
not only from the racialization of state policy but also from sedimented material
inequality.
Alicia and Ed, who are white, come from affluent families. Ed’s
mother’s family owned a chain of grocery stores and a small chain of
dress shops. His father has inherited a substantial amount of money
from his family’s manufacturing concern. Alicia’s mother taught school
212. Id. at 21.
213. Id.
214. See id. at 152, 154-55.
215. See id. at 154. Consider a case in which the black family could not provide an advance
inheritance so that their children could easily afford to get a university education and not start their
life under a heavy debt burden. “Albert and Robyn took out some loans to finance their education
at a public university. Stacie starts her law career $80,000 in the red. Among the blacks
interviewed, only Mary Ellen, whose parents were quite wealthy and who has now moved into the
family business, had her college education paid for.” Id. at 153-54.
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1415
and her father was a self-employed attorney, then a state judge. Alicia
went to a private school where her mother taught Latin and English, and
Ed spent many years at a boarding school. Their families hoped these
private institutions would furnish a better education than their public
counterparts. For the same reason as well as others, Ed and Alicia will
probably send their two children to private school too.216
In Black Wealth/White Wealth, Oliver and Shapiro only permitted individual
cases to present in this social history of poverty so that they could effectively
illustrate that blacks and whites fared differently and materially better, even
though blacks and whites may have been similarly situated and equally motivated
to provide a better life not only for themselves but also for their children. This
social history of poverty turned on deeply entrenched asset accumulation
opportunities and on grossly maldistributed wealth and income. Although Oliver
and Shapiro acknowledged that blacks did experience material success,
especially from 1939 to the early 1970s when the civil rights movement urged
Congress to enact antidiscrimination laws and when the nation’s economy grew
at an extraordinary rate.217 Yet, for these sociologists, structural barriers cannot
promote equal opportunity and results, and so while blacks have suffered and
while some blacks make economic progress, they cannot eradicate the
sedimented, structural inequality on which white wealth grew and by which
blacks, regardless of their motivation, lagged further behind whites. One way to
remedy this material inequality, for Oliver and Shapiro, is to guarantee not only
equal opportunity but also “equal achievement.”218 In the end, larger, structural
forces will frustrate individual cases unless broad, structural changes eliminate
sedimented material inequality.219
Likewise, in American Apartheid, Massey and Denton focused on larger,
structural forces when they examined the persistence of urban ghettos and the
underclass. Unfortunately, like Oliver and Shapiro, they too eliminated human
agents (e.g., the subject), placing them strategically throughout this sociological
exposition of poverty where they best served to illustrate how larger, structural
forces created and maintained “hypersegregation.” For Massey and Denton,
white racial prejudice coupled with institutional barriers not only froze blacks in
urban ghettos, but also entombed them in the black underclass. A history of
racism, real estate brokers, and institutional forces like banking, HOLC, and FHA
conjoined to deny blacks access to better communities. Hypersegregation thus
became a “reality,” principally because most blacks simply cannot escape beyond
vanilla rings that encircled urban ghettos. Therefore, hypersegregation worked
like racialization of state policy and sedimented material inequality; they
symbolized larger, structural forces that have remained insensitive to individual
aspirations and desires. In effect, Massey and Denton purported that we need not
216.
217.
218.
219.
Id. at 153.
See id. at 23-25.
Id. at 177-78.
See id. at 179-93.
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focus on human agents, for they cannot overcome the dark oppression that is
residential segregation and the black underclass.
In American Apartheid, Massey and Denton rely on structural factors like
underclass poverty and the intensity of spatial concentration to conclude that
blacks cannot truly escape the ghetto. On a broader social level, Oliver and
Shapiro make the same point.220 This conclusion confused me. Does society
victimize inner city minorities when it adopts policy that intensifies their
isolation? Or, do we look to clearly identifiable behavior to explain the degree
and depth to which racism, inner city ghettos, and hypersegregation explain by
minority blacks and others get isolated in ghettos? At one point, they assert that
extreme racial isolation occurred because whites engaged self consciously and
purposefully in institutional practices that they orchestrated to have this effect.221
If true, the white behavior looks less institutional and more individual or group
related. By institutional, I mean a practice that continues without regard to who
occupies the decision office. Yet, institutions cannot exist without human
energy. They require us. We focus our collective energies through them. On a
large social scale, humans and institutions form symbiotic ties. Whether
individual conduct or institutional practices, we—each of us—act, either in
concert or as single agent, but we act. What then explains hypersegregation—
whites, social structure, institutional practices, or both?
Why the confusion? Massey and Denton recognize that social structures
perpetuate racial isolation, and they also wish to say that blacks don’t live in
intense racial isolation because they, due to personality traits, created their own
residential difficulties. They take a familiar approach. To this end, they assert
that the “effect of segregation on black well-being is structural, not individual.
Residential segregation lies beyond the ability of any individual to change; it
constrains black life chances irrespective of personal traits.”222 With this
approach, Massey and Denton have thoroughly reduced blacks to victims, and in
so doing, they have completely omitted blacks and other urban minorities from
the social equation entirely.
When I lived in New York City ghettoes, particularly in publicly subsidized
housing projects that were operated by the New York City Housing Authority,
I knew that I could not destroy the physical blight that surrounded me. At the
time, I knew that I could not then earn enough money to rebuild my community.
I knew that I could not force local city officials to provide city services as if the
Lillian Wald Projects or the Seward Park Extensions were Chelsea or the upper
River Side. At the same time, I also knew that I simply lived in the ghetto. I was
not of the ghetto. My ghetto “walls” simply housed my family; they did not bind
my mind, my thoughts, my dreams. While I could not physically alter my
220. OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 68 (“We contend that the buried fault line of the
American social system is who owns financial wealth—and who does not. The existence of such
a wealthy class ensures that no matter the skills and talents, the work ethic and character of its
children, the latter will inherit wealth, property, position, and power.”).
221. MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 2.
222. Id. at 2-3.
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1417
neighborhood, one predominated by blacks and Latinos, I could extent my mind
beyond where I lived. I live where I live, but did structure mandate that l reside
forever in the Lillian Wald Projects? If so, no one told me so. I am not unique;
others have moved their minds and bodies beyond inner city ghettoes. As such,
what of my life chances? What of my personal traits?
Why should my personal traits matter, even if I live within structural
practices that we have co-created to isolate me racially within urban ghettoes?
Given the Matrix, it matters because I like everyone share an energy relationship,
regardless of my race, my class, my income, my wealth, etc. It matters because
I can only be victimized if I think that I have been. I do not mean to suggest that
the state officials cannot abridge my civil rights. I do not mean that a private
citizen cannot wrongfully defraud me of personal funds. I do not mean that a
corporation through its officers and directors cannot practice consumer fraud,
thus breaching a commercial contract under which I bought goods.
Notwithstanding these constitutional and civil violations, what matters is how I
choose to experience these events. Parents, authority figures, and cultural norms
cannot influence how I think so that I learn to surrender my choice to cause
deliberately what happens next in my life. Once so influenced, I will allow the
effect of other people’s choices, including those of my parent’s making, to
determine my life’s course.
If I allow others to influence me, and if they tell me that living in abject
poverty and that limiting my personal world to a ghettos “wall” mean suffering,
some kind of personal rejection by society, then I will more than likely
internalize this perspective. If I also learn that I suffer in this manner because I
am black or poor or low family station, then I will more than likely experience
my personal world through race, class, or station. More than likely, my parent
acquires this perspective from others who she trusted including mass culture, and
to this extent, she was connected to the Matrix. Does the Matrix carry only
negative, horrible energy for poor urban blacks? In this Matrix, the energy
carries diverse messages because we all have diverse experiences. Why then
would she choose a negative one over others? Regardless, I don’t anyone for
what choices they make. In the end, I make this point because social structures
matter and personal traits matter too.
II. A NEW AGE CRITICAL LEGAL THEORY AND THE CO -CREATIVE POWER
OF RACE CONSCIOUSNESS AND POVERTY
A. Introduction
In a New Age critical legal theory, we co-create all experiences.223 As Ernest
Holmes would argue, poverty follows from abnormal thinking, and thus it is an
223. SETH, PERSONAL REALITY, supra note 4, at 4 (“You project your thoughts, feelings, and
expectations outward, then you perceive them as the outside reality. When it seems to you that
others are observing you, you are observing yourself through the standpoint of your own
projections.”).
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abnormal condition. Yet, poverty only exists because we meditate on it as a
necessary reality. To this extent, as Ruíz would argue, the state, our parents, our
friends, our adaptation, or our culture forms an agreement with us, and after we
have acquired the language for reaffirming this agreement, then some of us cocreate poverty. Others co-create wealth.224 Still others co-create residential
segregation. Everyone who chooses poverty as a childhood experience can elect
different ways of experiencing material abundance. And those who select a birth
experience in which material abundance feels like the proverbial “silver spoon”
can too know poverty. As Seth clearly points out:
The structure of probabilities deals with parallel experience on all levels.
Your consciousness picks and chooses to accept as real the results of,
and ramifications of, only certain overall purposes, desires, or intents.
You follow these through a time structure. Your focus allows other justas-legitimate experience to become invisible or unfelt.225
In this way, Ruíz proffers an excellent point. Society seeks to hook our
attentions so that, especially through the familiarity and comfort and trust of our
parents, we learn to accept certain agreements. Agreements structure the manner
in which we co-create and expect certain events, all of which reinforce and
stabilize our knowing about our personal worlds and manifold realities.
According to Seth, “you create your experiences through your expectations.”226
Accordingly, if our selected focus, viz., “race-focused” consciousness, permits
us to screen out “just-as-legitimate experience,” then who co-creates poverty?
Who co-creates wealth? Who co-creates residential segregation?
Unfortunately, by embracing structural sociology, Oliver, Shapiro, Massey,
and Denton must reject the implicit connection between agreement and external
reality. Even modern physicists acknowledged that subjects create the reality
that they experience. As Seth points out, “You always know what you are doing,
even when you do not realize it.”227 Why then do we continue to internalize
224. STANLEY & DANKO, supra note 36, at 3-4. Stanley and Danko write:
The large majority of these millionaires are not the descendants of the Rockefellers or
Vanderbilts. More than 80 percent are ordinary people who have accumulated their
wealth in one generation. They did it slowly, steadily, without signing a multimilliondollar contract with the Yankees, without winning the lottery, without becoming the
next Mick Jagger. Windfalls make great headlines, but such occurrences are rare. In
the course of an adult’s lifetime, the probability of becoming wealthy via such paths is
lower than one in four thousand. Contrast these odds with the proportion of American
households (3.5 per one hundred) in the $1 million and over net worth category.
Id.
225. 1 ROBERTS, supra note 15, at 52-53.
226. SETH, PERSONAL REALITY, supra note 4, at 11.
227. Id. at 4. See GIDDENS, CONSTITUTION, supra note 34, at xxii-xxiii. In effect, Seth
suggests that a person can know what and why she does a given thing. On this point, Anthony
Gidden writes:
Human agents or actors – I use the terms interchangeably – have, as an inherent aspect
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1419
beliefs, agreements, or expectations that co-create poverty?228 By discounting the
beliefs, agreements, or expectations by which the poor live in the context in
which they must place themselves, Oliver, Shapiro, Massey, and Denton reject
implicitly any inherent value in studying the inextricable links between race
consciousness and experiences. In New Age critical legal theory, a person’s
beliefs, agrees, or expects work intimately with and necessarily co-create a
person’s experiences, material abundance, and at the very least the social reality
in which she lives. Accordingly, a New Age critical legal theory posits that a
person can only experience that which she has already projected into the
world.229
Given this New Age critical legal theory, in which victims do not exists, in
which we co-create all experiences because we are powerful reality creators, I
posit that Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid must be rather
excellent sociological narratives that construct poverty as external, objective
reality over which the poor have no control.230 As such, as they aptly and
consistently recommend, America must alter itself structurally so that blacks,
of what they do, the capacity to understand what they do while they do it. The reflective
capacities of the human actor are characteristically involved in a continuous manner in
the flow of day-to-day conduct in the contexts of social activity. But reflexivity operates
only partly on a discursive level. What agents know about what they do, and why they
do it – their knowledgeability as agents – is largely carried in practical consciousness.
Practical consciousness consists of all the things which actors know tacitly about how
to “go on” in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive
expression.
Id.
228. SETH, PERSONAL REALITY, supra note 4, at xvii. Seth aptly writes:
No one forces you to think in any particular manner. In the past you may have learned
to consider things pessimistically. You may believe that pessimism is more realistic
than optimism. You may even suppose, and many do, that sorrow is ennobling, a sign
of deep spiritualism, a mark of apartness, a necessary mental garb of saints and poets.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Id.
229. Id. at 4. Seth writes:
You are the living picture of yourself. You project what you think you are outward
into flesh. Your feelings, your conscious and unconscious thoughts, all alter and form
your physical image. This is fairly easy for your to understand.
It is not easy, however, to realize that your feelings and thoughts form your exterior
experience in the same way, or that the events that appear to happen to you are initiated
by you within your mental or psychic inner environment.
Id. See JOHN R. SEARLE, THE REDISCOVERY OF THE MIND 1 (1992) (“Mental phenomena are caused
by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain. . . . I call it
‘biological naturalism.’ Mental events and processes are as much part of our biological natural
history as digestion, mitosis, meiosis, or enzyme secretion.”).
230. Cf. Anthony V. Alfieri, The Antinomies of Poverty Law and a Theory of Dialogic
Empowerment, 16 N.Y.U. REV. L & SOC. CHANGE 659 (1989).
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whites, and others can enjoy both equal opportunity and equal achievement.
Along the way, Oliver, Shapiro, Massey, and Denton destroy or mute the subject,
rendering blacks either as emotionally and historically patterned to fail or as
perennial victims of something behemoth and daunting—dominant social
structures.
In this way, Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid diminish
the absolutely central role that our race consciousness, especially minorities,
plays in co-creating personal worlds and maintaining manifold social realities.
In this essay, I have already argued that blacks, whites, and others must be very
powerful reality creators who simply cannot victimize each other. In one world,
the absence of material abundance can be viewed as poverty, as suffering. In
another world, the absence of material wealth can be view as an experience that
reflects a person’s inner reality, as a confirmation, as an opportunity.
Accordingly, many blacks live in different personal worlds and social realities,
even though they live next door to each other, and even though they work in the
same department, on the same floor, for the same company. Some of these
blacks will work their entire lives and die poor. Some of them will work their
entire lives and garner vast wealth. As Thomas Kuhn properly argued, new
paradigms co-exist with old ones.231
Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid do not ask the following
questions: Why do the dominant social structures affect some blacks but not
others? Are some blacks adapting differently? Are some blacks deeply
ensconced in the culture of poverty? Are some blacks bounded by learned
helplessness? These questions apply to whites and others. Notwithstanding
Oliver and Shapiro’s point that racialization of state policy and sedimented
wealth inequality still have present effects that limit how blacks and whites
acquire asset accumulation opportunities, and notwithstanding Massey and
Denton’s observation that residential segregation driven by white racism explains
the origins and persistence of the black underclass, we must move beyond race.232
Accordingly, we must ask: do some people believe that they live not as
participators but as observers? As such, do they believe that they have no affect
on (or control of) their physical world? Do they think that only one physical
world exists? Have they learned through agreements do deny “a spectrum of all
possible realities”? What are their “overall purposes, desires, or intents”? How
did they acquire such purposes, desires, or intents? By focusing on agreements,
purposes, desires, or intent, are we simply living out lives as domesticated
humans or are we in training to live as angelic humans?
From a New Age perspective, these questions suggest that each of us chooses
the road that leads to our personal self-discovery. Our roads exist coextensively
with others, and we can alter and bend our roads at will. Because many social
231. See generally THOMAS KUHN, THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS (1996)
(discussing the institutional and academic tensions between competing normal sciences (i.e.,
paradigms)).
232. See generally RICHARD J. PAYNE, GETTING BEYOND RACE: THE CHANGING AMERICAN
CULTURE (1998).
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1421
realities exist simultaneously with others, and different segments of society
embrace one or more of these social realities, each of us relies on others to
practice co-creating wealth, poverty, and residential segregation. And as Robert
Ornstein points out, we use these personal worlds and social realities
transactionally as we negotiate different settings.233 As a result, equal
opportunities do exist coterminously with unequal opportunities. Real
opportunities for asset accumulation exist coextensively with unreal ones.
Extremes of wealth and poverty can exist literally within city blocks or a few
miles from each other. And affluent blacks, even those who may conclude that
America can still do more, may see America as a nation of equal opportunities
(or a nation of relatively increasing equal opportunities). Other blacks will view
America as a nation of white opportunity and black oppression, a place where
hard working black men perennially live under the hobnail boot of white
prejudice.234 Likewise, whites may garner financial assets or other opportunities
because they focus on moving upward and onward, having little if any time for
what may be wrong with America.235 Other whites simply cannot see beyond the
bleak horizon, the one first shown to them by prior generations, the one etched
out for them by the day-to-day struggle to earn a simple living. Regardless, each
of these personal and social realities operates to delimit our perspectives, even
among those who we may deem progressive and smart.236
Given that personal worlds and manifold social realities exist, which point
of view is correct? In short, they all are. Neither is more or less correct than the
other. In reaching this conclusion, I do not embrace any argument that excuses
collective institutional practices that justify lost or denied opportunities for all
angelic humans. Unfortunately, neither Black Wealth/White Wealth nor
American Apartheid acknowledges that manifold social realities exist
coextensively, ultimately explaining why some blacks succeed and why some
blacks live in poverty, why some whites acquire wealth and why some whites
come into poverty and hold onto it until their deaths. Black Wealth/White Wealth
233. See ROBERT H. ORNSTEIN, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1972).
234. See generally WILEY, supra note 37.
235. See MICHAEL DYSON, RACE RULES: NAVIGATING THE COLOR LINE 4 (1996) (“Then [the
white writer] makes a remarkable statement: ‘In all sincerity, race isn’t much of an issue for
mainstream white America. We’re busy. It’s a complicated world. We have bigger problems to
deal with. We’re too preoccupied with simple survival to go around organizing systematic
prejudice of any kind.’”).
236. See ORNSTEIN, supra note 233, at 3. Ornstein aptly writes:
Our “ordinary” assumptions about the nature of the world are generally useful to us. As
we attempt to achieve a stable consciousness, we continuously “bet” about the nature
of reality. We immediately assume that our rooms are “really” rectilinear, that a piece
of coal is “really” black, that one person is intelligent, another aggressive. . . . [O]ur
world is conservative. It is quite difficult for us to alter our assumptions even in the face
of compelling new evidence. We pay the price of a certain conservatism and resistance
to new input in order to gain a measure of stability in our personal consciousness.
Id.
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and American Apartheid simply continue to cast blacks as victims, whether
historical or present-day. In many ways, Black Wealth/White Wealth and
American Apartheid, despite their rather radical ways of examining poverty and
residential segregation, can be viewed as Ruíz’s “hooking” of our attention.
They construct poverty as if it exists as an external, objective reality over which
blacks have no control, in which blacks played no active, co-creative role. And
in this way, Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid encourage us
to view blacks as helpless, whites as racism, and structural as hegemonic. By
examining poverty and residential segregation in this manner, Black
Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid reinforce the agreement that we
must live with poverty unless and until America embraces the remedies that they
propose,237 even though these remedies require the active, open-hearted
participation of powerful reality creators like blacks, whites, and others.
B. New Age Philosophy: Basic Premises
New Age philosophy begins with three basic premises. First, we possess an
enlightened soul within us, and second, we contain the power of law within each
of us.238 Many religious leaders like Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had
invited us to think in this way,239 except that they also urged us to worship Jesus
in order to know “God.” In New Age philosophy, we practice Jesus’ teaching,
recognizing that he was an ascended Master, without transmuting him into a deity
to who we must pray.240 When distilled, these premises yield a simple principle:
we are absolutely one with God, and God lives within each one of us.241 With
this principle, we live, work, and grow self-consciously with Spirit (or God) as
a self realized person,242 one who possesses an awakened spiritual consciousness
in a manner that differs very little from an eastern yogi.243
237. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 177-93; MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at
224-36.
238. See 1 LEE CARROLL, KRYON—THE END TIMES: NEW INFORMATION FOR PERSONAL PEACE
58 (1993).
239. See A TESTIMONY OF HOPE: THE ESSENTIAL WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF MARTIN LUTHER
KING, JR. (James Melvin Washington ed., 1991).
240. See 3 CARROLL, supra note 7, at 59; see also 2 LEE CARROLL, KRYON—DON’T THINK
LIKE A HUMAN!: CHANNELLED ANSWERS TO BASIC QUESTIONS (1994).
241. MARCINIAK, supra note 4, at 130 (“Prime Creator is all things.”).
242. See 1 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 43. According to Book 1, God states:
This is the goal of your soul. This is its purpose—to fully realize itself while in the
body; to become the embodiment of all that really is.
This is My plan for you. This is My ideal; that I should become realized through
you. That thus, concept is turned into experience, that I might know my Self
experientially.
Id. (emphasis in original).
243. See PARAMAHANSA YOGANANDA, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI 238-39 (1990); see also
MARCINIAK, supra note 4, at 242. According to the Pleiadians:
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The New Age philosophy’s third basic premise provides that we co-create
our personal and perforce social realities. Preliminarily, this premise contains
within it the eternal idea that God grants all human life with free will.244 Within
Western philosophy, this concept amounts to an old, but contested saw.245
Notwithstanding this philosophical tension in western thought, New Age posits
that we all co-create our moment-to-moment world. How can we co-create our
personal world and social realities? It is quite simple: we think; we have
emotions, and we have consciousness. As in other philosophical traditions,
thoughts constitute a form of energy, and this energy shapes “reality.” It does not
mean that I shape everyone else’s reality. It does mean that through my own free
will, I shape my own. Yet, parents impose their focus, purposes, desires, and
intents on their children, and in this process of socialization, children become
quite domesticated. This socialized domestication process quiets most children’s
inner flames, reducing their audible godheads to passing whispers. In this way,
as Ruíz and Seth pointed out, society can influence how we co-create our
personal worlds and social realities, and to this degree, the state imposes a mass
cultural consciousness on its citizens. Nevertheless, the citizen uses her cocreative power to reinforce dominant social structures with which she had formed
an agreement and by which she can learn to live comfortably or otherwise with
black poverty.246
Under this free will concept, this very simple proposition, however, gets a bit
complex when we acknowledge that outside forces (e.g., ideas) can influence
how we think. If a sufficiently large enough group of people has been influenced
to think in a given pattern (e.g., the rich get richer, the poor get poorer), then this
group thought can contribute to a consciousness matrix,247 a once contested idea,
As you raise your vibratory rates, you become your light body. You will see the change
in your body literally. Your will become more vital, more youthful, more nourished in
its own being, and definitely the processor of a multitude of information. It will become
a super being. The building of the light body involves become a super being.
Id.
244. See 1 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 39. According to God:
There are those who say that I have given you free will, yet these same people claim that
if you do not obey Me, I will send you to hell. What kind of free will is that? Does this
not make a mockery of God—to say nothing of any sort of true relationship between us?
Id.
245. See Baron Holbach, The Illusion of Free Will, in A MODERN INTRODUCTION TO
PHILOSOPHY 10 (Paul Edwards & Arthur Pap eds., 1965) (“Man’s life is a line that nature
commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from
it, even for an instant.”).
246. Cf. Bonnie Thorton Dill et al., Race, Family Values, and Welfare Reform, in A NEW
INTRODUCTION TO POVERTY, supra note 35, at 263, 270 (Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham argues that
race “speaks about and lends meaning to a host of other terms and expressions, to myriad aspects
of life that would otherwise fall outside the referential domain of race. . . . It blurs and disguises,
suppresses and negates, its own complex interplay with the very social relations it envelops.”).
247. See 2 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 83 (“Your popular psychology has termed this energy
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which we now assume has always existed as a stable, conserving idea.248 From
one agreement comes many, and from the many comes the falsely assumed
stability or permanence of a construct.249 At this juncture, people have placed
their free will in the service of the state, the powerful, the wealth, and ironically
the poor. In this way, people use their free will to support an agreement, an idea
that has simply become a socially meaningful convention.
Within New Age philosophy, social conventions—or different “realities”
competing within properly negotiated and similar linguistic spaces—have not
rend free will, the basic consciousness (i.e., energy) through which we all express
to some degree the highest concept we have of ourselves, either individually or
collectively.250 Despite these social conventions, we continuously co-create
manifold personal worlds and social “realities.” As I have already argued, these
worlds and realities co-exist more or less within dynamic social spaces, and that
an individual’s inner consciousness and our social “realities” do not have
separate existences. Yet, in co-creating these worlds and realities, especially
while agreements compete for our attention, we learn to deny that a host of
probabilities exists by which we can change literally any personal world or social
reality.251 Accordingly, while we still have free will and while we still remain
Matrix the ‘Collective Consciousness.’ It can, and does, affect everything on your planet: the
prospects of war and the chances of peace; geophysical upheaval or a planet becalmed; widespread
illness or worldwide wellness.”).
248. See ORNSTEIN, supra note 233, at 3 (“As we attempt to achieve a stable consciousness,
we continuously “bet” about the nature of reality.”).
249. See id. at 19. According to Aldous Huxley,
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into
which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the
accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim insofar as it confirms him
in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness, and as it bedevils his sense
of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual
things.
Id. (quoting ALDOUS HUXLEY, THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION (1954)).
250. See 1 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 39. According to God,
I have never set down a “right” or “wrong,” a “do” or a “don’t.” To do so would
be to strip you completely of your greatest gift—the opportunity to do as you please,
and experience the results of that; the chance to create yourself anew in the image and
likeness of Who You Really Are; the space to produce a reality of a higher and higher
you, based on your grandest idea of what it is of which you are capable.
To say that something—a thought, a word, an action—is “wrong” would be as
much as to tell you not to do it. To tell you not to do it would be to prohibit you. To
prohibit you would be to deny the reality of Who You Reality Are, as well as the
opportunity for you to create and experience that truth.
Id.
251. See 1 ROBERTS, supra note 15, at 53. According to Seth:
Such endless creativity can seem so dazzling that the individual would appear lost
within it, yet consciousness forms its own organizations and psychic interactions at all
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1425
very powerful reality creators, we allow social agreements to focus our purposes,
desires, and intent, and by so allowing, we focus on social experiences like
poverty, thereby rending invisible alternative social experiences in which poverty
cannot and does exist.252
Poverty constitutes a focus, an experience that hooks our attention. By
giving our attention to poverty, especially in a way that does not view it as a
limited, temporary construction, we judge it and the poor. They become
undeserving,253 and in this way we resist becoming one of them. We also make
moral judgments about the poor, so that we can conclude that God or some larger
force has banished them to a fate worse than yours.254 Unfortunately, by judging,
we focus and give attention, and by focusing and giving attention, we lock them
and ourselves into a social drama that permits wealth and poverty to co-exist
simultaneously. To complete the story, we construct a social industry that
reinforces that poverty exists beyond our co-creation.255 This industry
perpetuates poverty,256 and by assuming that people fell into poverty because they
possess poor values, morality, and work habits, we rationalize wealth as a social
good, unless we view extreme wealth as decadent or obscene.
levels. Any consciousness automatically tries to express itself in all probable directions,
and does so. In so doing it will experience All That Is through it own being, though
interpreted, of course, through that familiar reality of its own. You grow probable
selves as a flower grows petals. Each probable self, however, will follow through in its
own reality—that is, it will experience to the fullest those dimensions inherent to it.
Id.
252. See id. at 53. According to Seth:
Basically, however, the motion of any wave or particle or entity is
unpredictable—freewheeling and undetermined. Your life structure is a result of that
unpredictability. Your psychological structure is also. However, because you are
presented with a fairly cohesive picture, in which certain laws seem to apply, you think
that the laws come first and physical reality follows. Instead, the cohesive picture is the
result of the unpredictable nature that is and must be basic to all energy.
Id.
253. See Dill et al., supra note 246, at 271 (According to Michael Katz, “the transition to
capitalism and democracy in early-nineteenth-century America [justified] the ‘mean-spirited
treatment of the poor’ and [helped] to ‘ensure the supply of cheap labor in a market economy
increasingly based on unbound wage labor.’”) (citation omitted); see also Franklin, supra note 51,
at 131 (“The welfare system is indicted beyond its deleterious effects on black women, men,
children, work, and learning habits. Blacks are seen as ungrateful cheats who do not care about
anything.”).
254. See Marlene Kim, The Working Poor: Lousy Jobs or Lazy Workers, in A NEW
INTRODUCTION TO P OVERTY, supra note 35, at 307 (“Most Americans believe that if one works
hard, one should not be poor.”).
255. See Jennings, supra note 35, at 20.
256. Cf. Franklin, supra note 51, at 139 (“Conservatives point to soft-headed welfare liberal
leaders who have added to the incorrigible behavior of the black underclass by pressuring the public
to maintain assistance rather than making blacks look for work.”).
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By giving our focused attention to the implied agreements that correlate with
poverty, the poor and the rich have lost sight of who they are. They forget that
people are powerful reality creators, thus explaining why blacks and whites live
in poverty and abundance. Yet, by adopting the simple explanations like culture
of poverty, vicious circle, family degradation, sexual deviancy, and genetic
explanations, people assume that the wealthy must not have contributed to
poverty, and the poor must perforce live with the hand that God dealt them. In
this way, we collectively neglect our inner suspicions that people have allowed
society and their parents at the very least to simply adopt the dominant social
structures that serve as powerful agreements which structure the manner in which
we perceive the world. Traditional scholars would call these powerful
agreements—“mass cultural consciousness,”257 and they would argue that this
consciousness disempowers citizens so that elite interests can continue to
dominate the live of the poor and the ignorant.258
In this essay, mass cultural consciousness and Ruíz’s agreements in the
process of human domestication serve the same hegemonic role: they encourage
us not only to deny the three basic premises of New Age philosophy, but also to
accept the idea that we do not participate but simply observe. As such, we must
ask: to whom then must we look to overcome the problem of poverty, the
underclass, and residential segregation? In Black Wealth/White Wealth and
American Apartheid, Oliver, Shapiro, Massey, and Denton invite us to look to the
state and dominant social structures. Without considering policy makers, people
who have internalized mass cultural consciousness, the state can implement
broad structural programs like “Education and Youth Asset Accounts”259 and
257. Cf. Richard M. Thomas, Milton and Mass Culture: Toward a Postmodernist Theory of
Tolerance, 62 U. COLO. L. REV. 525, 533-35 (1991). Richard Thomas aptly writes:
One of their most important common themes, based on their shared view of the
importance of certain kinds of cultural totality or unitary cultural discourse, is the threat
that tolerance may pose to programs, to establish or preserve a preferred cultural totality.
Often the critics, both right and left, have operated within what broadly may be called
a “mass society” or “mass culture” critique. Mass consumer culture is seen as replacing
a genuine culture: for the right, this means the decline of class stability, moral
education, and national cohesiveness; for the left, primarily the Frankfurt School, this
means the appearance of a new propaganda apparatus by which the interest of capital
dominate mass consciousness and blind individuals to their true collective interests.
According to the various versions of the mass culture critique, the rise of mass culture
is identified with the decline of “organic community” and the cultural “whole,” and the
consequent “social atomization of ‘mass man.’”
Id. (citations omitted).
258. Cf. ORNSTEIN, supra note 233, at 39-40 (“Our ‘agreement’ on reality is subject to
common shared limitations that evolved to ensure the biological survival of the race. All humans
may agree on certain events only because we are all similarly limited in our very structure as well
as limited in our culture.”).
259. OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *, at 180-81.
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“Housing Asset Accounts”260 or a “National Action”261 and greater enforcement
by federal authorities.262 In this way, by meditating continuously on “external,”
objective reality, by adapting to the idea that this reality operates beyond our
active, conscious thinking, talking, and acting, we reject our birthright which is
free will, we deny that God lives within us, and we refuse to remember that we
are powerful reality creators.263 In so doing, we act like victims. We then look
to scholars like Oliver, Shapiro, Massey, and Denton, who tell us that federal
programs like welfare and federal laws can save us from that which we have
necessarily co-created. By internalizing what Ruíz calls “agreements,” by
adhering to what Talbot calls a “observer” perspective, and by failing to
acknowledge Holmes’ principle that “we can attract to ourselves people and
things which will obliterate that poverty,” we forget the basics, and we deny our
personal power to end poverty and residential segregation.
C. The Core Problem: The Meaning of Race Consciousness
Power comes from inner strength. Inner strength does not come from
raw power. In this, most of the world has it backwards.
Power without inner strength is an illusion. Inner strength without unity
is a lie. A lie that has not served the race, but that has nevertheless
deeply embedded itself into your race consciousness. For you think that
inner strength comes from individuality and from separateness, and that
is simply not so. Separation from god and from each other is the cause
of all your dysfunction and suffering. Still, separation continues to
masquerade as strength, and your politics, your economics, and even
your religions have perpetuated the lie.264
By race consciousness, it should be clear that Conversation with God does
not refer to the narrowness, madness of racial identity or ethnicity. In the
foregoing quote, race consciousness reinforces the point that I made in the
previous section: people have deliberately or by default surrender their angelic
humanity to constructs, into which people have invested their individual power
and collective psyche. Under this race consciousness, society has become a
260. Id. at 181-82.
261. MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 234-36.
262. See id. at 224 (“Although the 1988 amendments provide tougher penalties against those
who violate the Fair Housing Act and make it easier to prosecute discriminators, the basic
organization of enforcement still relies heavily on individuals. As long as the Fair Housing Act is
enforced by these ‘private attorneys general’ rather than by federal authorities, it is unlikely to be
effective.”).
263. SETH, PERSONAL REALITY, supra note 4, at 11 (“Basically you create your experience
through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality. Another way to understand this is to
realize that you create your experiences through your expectations.”).
264. 3 WALSCH, supra note 13.
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steward over social realities like poverty, wealth, and residential segregation.
Society not only guides and steers these constructs through the labyrinth that is
our political system, but also protects them from radical social change. On this
point, Massey and Denton write: “the policies we have recommended do not
require major changes in legislation. What they require is political will. Given
the will to end segregation, the necessary funds and legislative measures will
follow.”265 In order to protect dominant social structures about poverty, wealth,
and residential segregation, we also resist any modest legislative initiative.266 On
this point, Massey and Denton write: “For each proposal that is advanced to
move the fair housing agenda forward, there are other efforts to set it back.”267
Accordingly, in this context, race consciousness reveals that we co-create
poverty, wealth, and residential segregation by the means through which we
boldly accept that race justifies banishing the poor to their deadly
circumstances,268 and by which we knowingly embrace agreements that give us
power over the socialized Other (e.g., poor blacks).269
In this way, our race consciousness (e.g., mass cultural consciousness) allows
us to think that the poor exist out there. It permits us to conclude that we—all
of us—did not deliberately or by default co-create the concept of poverty and
wealth. In this conclusion, we can find biases based on morality and work ethic.
The poor cannot get that for which they will not work. The poor lack a real
religious foundation. With our race consciousness, we falsely comfort ourselves
that our thinking, talking, and acting bear no relationship to the manner in which
we endorse our social logic. We retreat to the following rationalization: Poverty
existed before I was born, and it will be here long after I am gone; I better get
mine while the getting is good. We use our race consciousness to disconnect
from the personal worlds and social realities in which other spiritually based
angelic humans must live too.
Our race consciousness also reveals the manner in which we connect to the
spirituality, God, Goddess, All There Is. This spirituality exists within us, and
I noted in the foregoing section, one of New Age’s basic principles is that God
lives within each of us. Accordingly, by spirituality, I do not mean institutional
or organized religions, all tools of mass culture in which people surrender their
co-creative power to political agents who cannot imagine a world in which
organized religion does not exist.270 Without this spiritual connection, race
265. MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 234.
266. See id. (“But political will is precisely what has been lacking over the past several
decades, and resistance to desegregation continues to be strong.”).
267. Id.
268. See George, supra note 40, at 197 (Charles Murray “in fact, announces that he is ready
to abandon a sizable portion of [the black underclass] to its unpleasant fate.”).
269. See, e.g., Jennings, supra note 35, at 19 (“Gilder suggests that the poor have a depraved
morality that society can rectify by using draconian measures to punish and imprison the recalcitrant
poor for a behavior considered negative by middle-class society.”).
270. See 1 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 154-55. According to Walsch, God writes:
[When what people tell you conflicts with what you feel intuitively, where do you
2001]
A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
1429
consciousness means that we not only reject our basic goodness and love, but
also embrace political power, racial and gender oppression, separation and
isolation, brute individualism and private profiteering, personal and familial
dysfunction, fear and distrust, war and violence over peace and reconciliation,
judgment over acceptance, suffering over healing, impotence and irresponsibility
over autonomy and agency. Without this spiritual connection, we live at a lower,
human consciousness. On this point, Ken Keyes writes:
[With lower human consciousness], the young child uses ego
mechanisms backed by hair-trigger emotions to develop security,
sensation, and power magnification of the moment[-]to[-]moment
sensory inputs. Our personal development into fulfilling, happy lives (as
well as the progression of civilization beyond the dangerous power
consciousness) depends on our getting free of our ego-backed, subjectobject, me-them, security-sensation-power hang-ups.271
Under this lower race consciousness, society needs poverty, wealth, and
residential segregation. Our current social, political, and economic institutions
stand on these constructs, ones that allow the wealthy to have “security,
sensation, and power magnify[ed]” by the depths of their dollars, by the diversity
of their investment portfolios. By having this disconnect from our spirituality,
our society and our parents can hook our attention so that we fail to realize that
this race consciousness creeps slowly, but indelibly, into our personal
constitutions. Few, if any of us, can sincerely imagine ourselves without this
form of race consciousness operating either explicitly or implicitly as our
cosmological backdrops.
Historically, society has used this race consciousness in laudable ways. This
consciousness asked us to dream, aspire, and imagine a new prosperous world;
furthermore, it provides social, political, and economic space so that we realize
these dreams, aspirations, and imaginations. By this consciousness, great
inventions and innovations have been borne. Equally important, the Constitution
invokes a negative liberty, in which the state cannot infringe upon a citizen’s
rights unless the state has a compelling reason, legitimate goals, and a rational
basis for interfering with or classifying citizens in a way that undermines their
go?] The first place you go is to your religionists—the people who put you there in the
first place. You go to your priests and your rabbis and your ministers and your teachers,
and they tell you to stop listening to your Self. The worst of them will try to scare you
away from it; scare you away from what you intuitively know.
They’ll tell you about the devil, about Satan, about demons and evil spirits and hell
and damnation and every frightening thing they can think of to get you to see how what
you were intuitively knowing and feeling was wrong, and how the only place you’ll find
any comfort is in their thought, their idea, their theology, their definitions of right and
wrong, and their concept of Who You Are.
Id. (emphasis in original).
271. KEYES, supra note 38, at xv.
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liberty interest,272 viz., freedom.273 With this Constitution, this consciousness
cloaks these inventions and innovations with protections so that we may profit
from the ingenuity on which we relied to benefit our society.274 In the absence
of federal copyright and patent protections, states rely on statutory and common
law regimes to shield human energies, capital, and materials from illegitimate
business practices.275 To this extent, a race consciousness that embraces this
principle of individuality and separation can yield positive, noteworthy ends for
society.
Nevertheless, society uses this race consciousness deliberately or by default
to co-create poverty, wealth, and residential segregation. As Conversation with
God points out, our race consciousness operates so insidiously within our
cognitive field. Let us consider Black Wealth/White Wealth and American
Apartheid. We know that racialized wealth inequality and persistence
segregation and the making of the underclass have historic origins. When Oliver
and Shapiro discuss the role of slavery and Jim Crow politics in the wealth
inequality of blacks and when Massey and Denton critique the persistence of
residential segregation and its role in the development of the urban underclass,
they directly implicate this race consciousness. Slavery, Jim Crow, the Federal
Housing Authority, and the HOLC internalized white fear, and these statesponsored policies must have been premised on the idea that whites and blacks
not only originated from different human species,276 but also live different social
and personal lives.277 Race consciousness privileges this personal and social
agreement.
Notwithstanding this race consciousness, a New Age approach depends on
both individual agency and a broad spiritual connection between all angelic
humans. A New Age approach promotes individual centered self-actualizing
philosophy. It also locates the individual in social practices and cultural norms.
272. See, e.g., Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954); Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S.
356 (1886); Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873). See also Robert M. Cover, The Origins
of Judicial Activism in the Protection of Minorities, 91 YALE L.J. 1287, 1295 (1982); Joseph
Tussman & Jacobus tenBroek, The Equal Protection of the Laws, 37 CAL. L. REV. 341, 341 (1949).
273. See generally MICHAEL J. SANDEL, LIBERALISM AND THE LIMITS OF JUSTICE (1982).
274. See, e.g., Int’l News Serv. V. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918).
275. See, e.g., Texon Drilling Co. v. Elliff, 210 S.W.2d 558 (Tex. App. 1948).
276. See J. H. Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, in DOCUMENTS OF
AMERICAN PREJUDICE, supra note 23, at 291.
The Negro is a different being from the white man, and therefore, of necessity, was
designed by the Almighty Creator to live a different life, and to disregard this—to shut
our eyes and blindly beat our brains against the decree—the eternal purpose of God
himself, and force this negro to live our life, necessarily destroys him, for surely human
forces can not dominate or set aside those of Omnipotence.
Id. (excerpted from J. H. VAN EVRIE, M.D., WHITE SUPREMACY AND NEGRO SUBORDINATION 31220 (Horton & Co. 1868)).
277. See, e.g., Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 2
(1883).
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These approaches do not conflict because a New Age philosophy premises itself
on the idea that each of us lives interdependent and interconnected spiritual lives.
None of us is ever disconnected from a larger, spiritual cosmology.278
Accordingly, a New Age approach embraces a holistic, organic perspective,
never placing social practices and cultural norms outside and independent of
individual choices and mental focus. This approach begins and ends with the
central idea that people co-create all personal experiences and social realities.
Poverty falls within this approach. Consider the following:
First, it is not merely a question of those who want to “work hard” and
those who don’t. That is a simplistic way to cast the argument (usually
constructed in that way by the “haves”). It is more often a question of
opportunity than willingness. So the real job, and the first job in
restructuring the social order, is to make sure each person and each
nation has equal opportunity.279
While our social contract prompts the idea of equal opportunity, our current race
consciousness also markets personal and social agreements so that some citizens
fear success; they fear “acting like whitey.”280 By placing everyone (or every
“group”) at the center of all personal and social experiences, and by reminding
everyone that he or she never loses a connection to a larger, First Cause, even if
he or she has internalized the state’s or parent’s agreement, a New Age approach
to poverty merges individual intent with social realities. Neither simply exists
without the other. Yet, this merging does not negate individual choice and selfexpression. By taking this obviously unfragmented approach to the manner in
which we use race consciousness to co-create and maintain poverty, wealth, and
residential segregation,281 a New Age philosophy empowers all angelic humans.
Once empowered, we can responsibly proffer large segments of our society not
the “equal achievement” for which Oliver and Shapiro argue, but the equal
278. 1 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 197 (“Your body, your mind, and your soul (spirit) are one.
In this, you are a microcosm of Me—the Divine All, the Holy Everything, the Sum and Substance.
You see now how I am the beginning and the end of everything, the Alpha and the Omega.”). See
JERRY HICKS & ESTHER HICKS, ABRAHAM SPEAKS –A PERSONAL HANDBOOK TO ENHANCE YOUR
LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: NEW BEGINNING II 41 (1996) (“Every part of your
physical world is, and always has been, supported by that which is non-physical.”) [hereinafter cited
as HICKS & HICKS, ABRAHAM SPEAKS II].
279. 2 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 197.
280. See, e.g., Lynette Clemetson, Trying to Close the Achievement Gap (African Americans
Work Harder for Academic Achievement in Shaker Heights, Ohio), NEWSWEEK, June 7, 1999, at
36 (“Then there is peer pressure. Most teens at Shaker say they do not buy the old line that doing
well means selling out to white culture. ‘What, only white people study?’ says junior Justin Taylor.
‘That’s just plain stupid and insulting.’ But if student don’t catch flak for ‘acting white,’ they faced
mixed messages about what it means to ‘act black.’”).
281. See DAVID BOHM, THOUGHT AS A SYSTEM 3 (1992) (“One of the obvious things wrong
with thought is fragmentation. Thought is breaking things up into bits which should not be broken
up.”).
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opportunity282 by which individual dreams, desires, and aspiration can bear
fruit.283 Equally important, we can co-creatively choose a race consciousness, in
which the social “reality” from among the many the probable ones on which we
might focus dignifies and honors all angelic humans.284
D. Spirituality: Privileging Experience over Self-Denial, Self-Destruction
In New Age philosophy, race consciousness operates on two levels: human
consciousness driven by hair-trigger emotions, power seeking, sensation
collecting, security doubting personalities, and racialized identities conditioned
white superiority over black inferiority, and black poverty based on immorality,
laziness, promiscuity, and the absence of middle-class values. Despite these
levels of meaning, race consciousness exists co-extensively with spirituality.
Each lives without meaningful distinction. Above all else, spirituality represents
a state of being, one that centers this philosophy. Spirituality refers to a state of
mind, a mind that relates self-consciously to God. It is an equal relationship,
humans and God. And as in life, it is a relationship without obligations. Despite
the manner in which race consciousness (e.g., agreements or mass culture)
socializes us to co-create poverty, wealth, or residential segregation, our essential
Self can still choose differently. We have absolute freedom.285 With this
absolute freedom, we can focus on a self-empowering philosophy like New Age
or a victim-centered race consciousness. Regardless, we can still choose to cocreate poverty, wealth, or residential segregation. Yet, by adopting a selfempowering philosophy, one can deliberately choose to experience poverty or
wealth. In so doing, she does not blame anyone else for the manner in which she
experienced her creations. She recognizes that she is a very powerful reality
creator. By adopting a victim-centered theory, he can co-create poverty, wealth,
or residential segregation by default. Not realizing why he cannot keep or attain
material abundance, he blames the world, faulting either white racism emanating
from a history of slavery and Jim Crow laws or racial quotas flowing from civil
282. Id. at 5 (“The more general difficulty with thought is that thought is very active, it’s
participatory.”).
283. See CONLEY, supra note 100, at 7 (“[E]quality of opportunity. Under this concept,
equality would be achieved if each individual in a society enjoyed the right to compete in a contest
unimpaired by discrimination of any kind.”).
284. 3 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 150. Consider the implications of acceptance.
Enlightenment begins with acceptance, without judgment of “what is.” . . .
This is known as moving into the Isness. It is in the Isness where freedom will be
found.
What you resist, persists. What you look at disappears. That is, it ceases to have
its illusory form. You see it for what it Is. And what Is can always be changed. It is
only what Is Not that cannot be changed. Therefore, to change the Isness, move into it.
Do not resist it. Do not deny it.
Id.
285. Id. at 137.
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rights laws.286 According to Abraham,
By virtue of powerful Universal Laws, you receive all things. Whether
you have an abundance of dollars or lack of them, an abundance of
health or continual sickness, satisfying, fulfilling relationships or
difficult and unsatisfying relationships, is determined by the way you, as
an individual, apply the Laws of the Universe. Without exception you
are applying the Laws, for without exception you are the creator of this
physical experience.287
By racializing our experiences, we rely on a race consciousness that renders
us victims, and in so doing we reject our spirituality. By acknowledging that
consciousness and spiritual are living energy, we can begin to understand that
each operates, whether we acknowledge the principles, according to the Law of
Attraction.288 What is this Law? “That which is like unto itself is drawn.”289 By
embracing this Law, even if we reject spirituality, we can still choose to co-create
from positive thinking, talking, acting, and emotions.290 In effective, each person
can co-create anything into his or her personal experience. By knowingly
combining spirituality and absolute freedom, one can deliberately and joyously
embark on material abundance without praising favorable social policies or
without damning regressive social welfare programs. Nevertheless, this
spirituality and absolute freedom do not lead perforce to social anarchy. Rather,
we can deliberately combine them to co-create opportunity.291
In New Age philosophy, opportunity means the absence of obligations. One
of the basic tenets of New Age thinking is free will. Obligations mock free will.
“Opportunity, not obligation, is the cornerstone of religion, the basis of all
spirituality. So long as you see it the other way around, you will have missed the
286. See HICKS & HICKS, ABRAHAM SPEAKS II, supra note 278, at 70 (“The predominant
emotional state of most biological beings is that of negative emotion. Therefore, the predominant
experiences that he attracts into his experiences are also negative, for from his negative position he
perpetuates more negative.”).
287. Id. at 78.
288. See HICKS & HICKS, ABRAHAM SPEAKS I, supra note 6, at 17 (“Once one of your beliefs
has surfaced, that belief, or thought—for a belief is nothing more than a thought that you have
thought before, that you continue to think—that thought will attract other thoughts that are like it.
it is what we call the ‘Law of Attraction.’”).
289. HICKS & HICKS, ABRAHAM SPEAKS II, supra note 278, at 81.
290. See id. at 82. Abraham writes:
The Universe is responsive only when harmony exists. In clearer terms: When you
think of something you do not want, cancer, for example, and you feel the negative
emotion that you term “dread” or “fear,” you have harmony—and that cancer is on its
way into your existence. When you think of something you do want, perfect health, for
example, and you feel the positive emotion of “peace” and “joy,” you have
harmony—and that perfect health is on its way into your experience.
Id.
291. See 1 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 137.
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point.”292 Accordingly, society cannot force rich citizens to share their wealth
with poor ones, and when society requires sharing through taxes (and other
wealth transferring mechanisms), the wealthy resent the fiscal intrusion.293
Equally important, the poor too will reject liberal welfare programs, especially
those that through confiscatory taxes appear to impose on his future dream to
material abundance.294 Likewise, when our society enacted the Fair Housing Act
of 1968,295 racial discrimination in housing markets that fell within its scope was
outlawed.296 Despite the Fair Housing Act, courts still act to ensure that blacks,
whites, and others can live harmoniously together.297 Nevertheless, obligations
do not work.
Because obligations do not work, society cannot impose its will on citizens
until they learn that race consciousness and racism injure all people. I do not
mean to suggest that the United States Supreme Court should not have decided
a case like Brown v. Board of Education.298 Yet, even the United States Supreme
Court recognized that lower district courts would need time to work through the
depth of racial ignorance and hatred. In 1955, it granted breathing room for this
gradual change in “race” consciousness with its “all deliberate speed”
injunction.299 Accordingly, society, especially if it is guided by enlightened
minds, must enact empowering legislation so that each of us has real, equal
opportunities, and at the same time, society must also develop empowering
approaches for those citizens who can release their singular commitment to race
consciousness, racism, and self hatred.
So what works? Experience works.300 None of us gets sufficiently positive,
interpersonal experiences with each other if blacks suffer hypersegregation in
isolated urban areas. None of us has an opportunity to overcome our apparent
differences, and to this extent, we must view racial segregation, especially given
the depth to which Massey and Denton suggested that the problem exists, as
singularly the most pernicious impediment to racial harmony. Racial segregation
allows whites to resist releasing race consciousness and racism by retreating
farther outside the steady movement of black out-migration patterns. When the
United States Supreme Court denied the City of Detroit the right to use annexed
school districts, it slowed the rate at which highly complex interpersonal social
292. Id. (emphasis in original).
293. See THOMAS BYRNE EDSALL & MARY D. EDSALL, CHAIN REACTION: THE IMPACT OF
RACE, RIGHTS, AND TAXES ON AMERICAN POLITICS (1991).
294. See Derrick Bell, Racism: A Major Source of Property and Wealth Inequality in
America, 34 IND. L. REV. 1261 (2001).
295. See 42 U.S.C. §§ 3601-3619, 3631 (2000).
296. See id. §§ 3604-3605.
297. See, e.g., United States v. Starrett City Assoc., 840 F.2d 1096 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 488
U.S. 946 (1988).
298. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
299. Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 349 U.S. 294, 301 (1955).
300. See HICKS & HICKS, ABRAHAM SPEAKS II, supra note 278, at 53 (“As teachers, we have
learned, long ago, that words to not teach. Learning comes through life experience.”).
2001]
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experience could have begun sooner than later to ameliorate the resistance by
white adults.301 With the end to racial segregation, we begin to recognize that
experience informs us on self-evident levels that blacks and whites seek the same
degree of recognition, a kind of connection that operates within all of us through
Spirit.
By living through race consciousness and racism, we engage in self-denial,
leading invariably to self-destruction. In Black Wealth/White Wealth, Oliver and
Shapiro detailed the manner in which the state developed policies to ensure white
asset accumulation opportunities over black.302 In order to ensure that blacks did
not compete successfully with white economic interest, organized violence
became an effective tool. In American Apartheid, Massey and Denton detailed
this use of extra-legal means to guarantee white privileges.303 Sometimes, this
violence led to unspeakable horrors with blacks suffering lynchings and live
burnings. During the civil rights movements, whites bombed a church, killing
small children. Years later, some of these men suffered federal prosecution.
Now, it is viscerally clear that murder is wrong, race notwithstanding. Prior to
these prosecutions, the killer of civil rights activists Medgar Evans was
successfully prosecuted. Consider further Governor George Wallace who
publicly denounced racial integration and who may have privately regretted
playing such a role in reinforcing our lower race consciousness.
Race consciousness and racism invite this kind of self-denial and allows us
instead to dismiss what we intimately and internally feel to be true. By so
denying our natural instincts, we lose touch with these urges and, with increasing
regularity, begin to believe that “racism” works for the advancement of society’s
favored. All of us, even those who defensively subscribe to a black
consciousness, contribute to this self-denial. Wealth disparity confirms this loss
of self, and it reassures those who have benefitted from sedimentation of
inequality that whites must be the superior race. Racial segregation provides
similar comfort for those who look disparagingly on the urban poor. By relying
on wealth disparity or racial segregation as a basis for ignoring the manner in
which we divorce ourselves not only from a spiritual life, but also from each
other, we refuse to accept personal responsibility. Absolution of responsibility
leads to the rejection of any agency in the manner in which blacks, whites, and
others have co-created poverty, wealth, and residential segregation.
E. Personal Responsibility: Agency and Co-Created Realities
In New Age philosophy, one of the center tenets is personal responsibility.
In recent legal and political discourse, personal responsibility has been used to
301. See Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974) (“Boundary lines may be abridged where
there has been a constitutional violation calling for interdistrict relief, but, the notion that school
district lines may be casually ignored or treated as a mere administrative convenience is contrary
to the history of public education in our country.”).
302. See OLIVER & SHAPIRO, supra note *.
303. See MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **.
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varying degrees to frame who should get help, who deserves help, and who
qualifies for help. Without altering, its core meaning, the New Age concept of
personal responsibility could be easily borrowed by conservatives and liberals,
even if both political groups pursue different social ends. Under New Age
philosophy, responsibility means that we have total “responsibility for all things
that are taking place in [our] life.”304 This tenet contends that we know at some
intuitive level that we planned to allow certain experiences into our lives. It does
not presuppose that each of us must do a given thing. Rather, we can do anything
because we “are not predestined to do anything.”305
This New Age concept of responsibility inextricably links itself to agency,
autonomy, and choice. At base, by conjoining responsibility and agency with
non-predestination, it follows that we only experience that which we choose to
co-create. We are not destined to experience a given event. To this degree, we
co-create our lives moment to moment.306 At the very least, this concept suggests
that we co-create either deliberately (or living conscious action) or by default (or
living unconscious reaction).307 As such, this concept appears to comport with
cause and effect.308 Unfortunately, cause and effect does not truly exist.309 Our
thoughts, specifically focused, emotionally clear ones, co-create our personal
experiences and manifold social realities. In so doing, I can affect my personal
experiences, my social realities. I cannot co-create for others, unless they have
had their attention firmed “hooked” and they have adopted as their own my
dreams, desires, and aspirations. As such, nothing ever victimizes us, at least not
without our permission.310 To be victims, we must embrace the idea that we do
not have choices.311 We must adopt the notion that we do not have free will. We
304. 3 CARROLL, supra note 7, at 74.
305. Id.
306. See 1 ROBERTS, supra note 15, at 54 (“Consciousness, to be fully free, had to be endowed
with unpredictability. All That Is had to surprise himself, itself, herself, constantly, through freely
granting itself its own freedom, or forever repeat itself. This basic unpredictability then follows
through on all levels of consciousness and being.”).
307. See HICKS & HICKS, ABRAHAM SPEAKS I, supra note 6; 2 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 13.
308. See ROBERT H. HOPCKE, THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS: SYNCHRONICITY AND THE STORIES
OF OUR LIVES 26 (1997) (describing synchronicity as “the simultaneous occurrence of two
meaningful but not casually connected events”).
309. See id. at 27. Robert Hopcke writes:
[C]asual thinking seduces us into an illusion of complete power over our surroundings
and enhances our sense that we are in control of our destiny, a vision quite flattering to
our own egos. Cause-and-effect thinking enables us to feel in control, to split ourselves
off from the world “outside” and operate upon it. In this causal worldview, we are
limited only by the consequences of our actions, but if we accept the consequences of
our actions, then act we may, and freely.
Id.
310. 3 CARROLL, supra note 7, at 75.
311. SETH, PERSONAL REALITY, supra note 4, at xvii (“Each thought has a result, in your terms.
The same kind of thought, habitually repeated, will seem to have a more or less permanent effect.
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1437
must subscribe to race consciousness, an agreement that requires us to surrender
our birthright as a powerful reality creator. Instead, we choose to make others
responsible for our choice to use drugs, for our desire to steal, for our aspiration
to have power over others, for our dream to live in poverty.312 Even though we
live in a social context, one of our own making, we must deliberately or by
default surrender our agency, autonomy, and choice. By so surrendering, we
allow critical moments, although not perennially lost ones, to “pass.” Within
New Age philosophy, it is at this critical moment that we can choose to diminish
extremes in wealth, eradicate poverty, or end residential segregation. President
Roosevelt’s New Deal, and President Johnson’s War on Poverty, and President
Bush’s Educational Reform mark these kinds of critical moments. New Age
philosophy strongly embraces this idea of personal responsibility, agency,
autonomy, and choice.
By allowing critical, co-creating moments to “pass,” we deny that we can
overcome race consciousness. We also refuse to end poverty and residential
segregation. In so doing, we fuel scarcity, heightening our need for security, for
money, for love, and for acceptance. This race consciousness lives within our
collective consciousness. None of us can lay claim to innocence, especially due
to racial differences. Thus, we always need constant meals of political power,
economic dominance, personal aggression, violence, oppression, racism,
ignorance, dependence, victimization, and gender conflicts. Yet, we can never
satisfy these needs. It is a spiritual disquiet, one that mentally replays our doubts
of the new and our fear of the living now. Unfortunately, we cannot see this
disquiet, this race consciousness. However, despite its apparent invisibility, we
express it by co-creating the homeless, the ignorant, the poor, the economic elite,
the segregated white and the isolated black. In this way, we build icons to this
deity daily, and we pay homage to it. We pay with old money, a form of
currency that still lingers from our distant past, viz., race oppression, gender
dominance, class conflicts, in which the change from this human dollar amounts
to lost opportunity, to wasted lives. As such, this race consciousness has an
emotional, psychological, physical, and mental needs that will prove bottomless.
With a spiritual consciousness that maintains a spirituality, that recognizes
its own agency, that appreciates how thinking and emotions co-create reality, that
accepts our victimless roles in our personal worlds and manifold social realities,
we would use our assets so that all of us had sufficient stores, so that social life
and economic survival were absolute guarantees. Thereafter, if we wish to use
our individual talents to acquire more assets, our society should acknowledge
both talents and the rewards, so long as our social constitution protected the
principle of universal social life and economic survival. Until we usher in that
day, our current race consciousness will reproduce political experiments and co-
If you like the effect then you seldom examine the thought. If you find yourself assailed by physical
difficulties, however, you begin to wonder what is wrong.”).
312. Id. (“[R]egardless of what you have told yourself thus far, you still do not believe that you
are the creator of your own experience. As soon as you recognize this fact you can begin at once
to alter those conditions that cause you dismay or dissatisfaction.”).
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create manifold social realities in which a few of us have great wealth and most
of us live in abject poverty.
III. POVERTY : RACIALIZED STRUCTURES WITH CO -CREATING SUBJECTS
Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid really represented truly
important, well-told sociological narratives. Apart from Melvin Oliver and
Thomas Shapiro’s deliberate focus on wealth and Douglas Massey and Nancy
Denton’s on hypersegregation and on the way private white prejudice conjoined
with black isolation, these sociological narratives felt like other great historical
or sociological tales that looked to historical and social structures. Through this
review essay, my point has been a simple one: these authors removed, and thus
greatly diminished, the role that blacks, whites, and others have played cocreatively in these very powerful sociological narratives.313 In making this point,
Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid still contributed vitally and
helped us understand the seamless complexity of underclass poverty, racialized
wealth, and hypersegregation.
However, by relegating these powerful reality creators to the margins, we
only learn that the state, financial institutions, real estate brokers, housing
markets, infrastructural developments, and organized violence and harassment
converged to intensify poverty, to weaken integration, and to isolate blacks.
Unfortunately, when we read these sociological narratives from this perspective,
we comfortably forget that we fueled these policies, violence, and isolation by
our race consciousness.314 We also refuse to acknowledge that blacks too were
unwilling to live in all-white communities, which rejected the idea that they
should be willing to be the first black family to integrate these communities.
When we combine these feelings, attitudes, and thoughts, we find powerful cocreative energy that fueled a collective idea that blacks and whites should live in
segregated communities. In Black Wealth/White Wealth and in American
Apartheid, we sleep past the possibility that blacks and whites co-created not
only the personal worlds in which neither trusted the other, but also the manifold
313. Cf. Schlag, supra note 201, at 1627; see also David S. Caudill, Pierre Schlag’s “The
Problem of the Subject”: Law’s Need for an Analyst, 15 CARDOZO L. REV. 707 (1993).
314. MASSEY & DENTON, supra note **, at 49. Massey and Denton write that:
The universal emergence of the black ghetto in American cities after 1940 rests on a
foundation of long-standing white racial prejudice. Although attitudes cannot be
studied directly before 1940, after this date opinion polls are available to confirm the
depth of white prejudice against blacks in the area of housing. In 1942, for example,
84% of white Americans polled answered “yes” to the question “Do you think there
should be separate sections in towns and cities for Negroes to live in?”; and in 1962,
61% of white respondents agreed that “white people have a right to keep blacks out of
their neighborhoods if they want to, and blacks should respect that right.” It was not
until 1970 that even a bare majority of white respondents (53%) disagreed with the latter
statement.
Id.
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social realities in which blacks and whites shared similar and different attitudes
about racial integration.
Yet, in working to understand poverty, wealth, and racial segregation from
a New Age perspective in which we co-create our personal worlds and manifold
social realities, Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid represented
radically traditional sociological narratives. Neither book truly raised blacks
above the victim status. In Black Wealth/White Wealth, Oliver and Shapiro
discussed economic detours, in which they cast blacks as business-minded
entrepreneurs and as victims of a racialized system that denied them access to
markets on which immigrant entrepreneurs have historically relied. Once again,
blacks get victimized by a racialized state determined to privilege white interests
over others’ interests, including those of blacks. This racialized system
guaranteed income and asset accumulation opportunities for whites. Can we
appreciate these historically racist practices without reinforcing that blacks,
despite their courageous ventures, were victimized then and today?
Likewise, in American Apartheid, Massey and Denton differed little from
Oliver and Shapiro, when they too viewed blacks not only as brave middle-class
believers in integration, but also as innocent victims of white prejudice and
entrenched institutional racism. In these narratives on wealth, poverty, and racial
segregation, blacks play no role in co-creating a social reality that contributes to
racial oppression.
In Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid, blacks have become
the absent subjects/agents who do not have the power to co-create a different
future.315 Rather, they must rely on the federal authorities and the white
communities’ commitment to end racialized wealth and racial segregation.
Unfortunately, in an effort to be compassionate liberals, Oliver, Shapiro, Massey,
and Denton cannot imagine re-presenting these historical and sociological
narratives in any way that weakens the strangle hold that victim category holds
over black life and their day-to-day choices.316
How are these excellent sociologists conditioning us to explain black
success?317 Would black success, especially a rags-to-riches story, get cast as an
315. See generally Robinson, supra note 7, at 283-87 (discussing the problem of the
subject/agent and the co-creation of racial realities). See also Justice, If Such a Thing Exists, in
DECONSTRUCTION IN A NUTSHELL: A CONVERSATION WITH JACQUES DERRIDA 125, 143-44 (John
D. Caputo ed., 1997).
316. Cf. SLEEPER, supra note 42, at 4. Although I do not intend to call Oliver, Shapiro,
Massey, and Denton liberal “racists”, consider the manner in which Sleeper portrays such liberals.
Sleeper writes:
[L]iberal racism patronizes nonwhites by expecting (and getting) less of them than they
are fully capable of achieving. Intending to turn the tables on racist double standards
that set the bar much higher for nonwhites, liberal racism ends up perpetuating double
standards by setting the bar so much lower for its intended beneficiaries that it denies
them the satisfactions of equal accomplishments and opportunity.
Id.
317. See ELLIS COSE , COLOR-BLIND: SEEING BEYOND RACE IN A RACE-OBSESSED WORLD xiii
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aberration? This story deviates from what?—our thoughts about personal worlds
and social realities? Who constructed these thoughts anyway? As I have already
argued, each of us does influence others, and in so doing, we may engage in selfdenial and perforce adopt self-destructive life patterns. Nevertheless, we still cocreate, except we use the ideas that come to be called mass culture or the
collective consciousness. How would we retell the story of black poverty? What
if a person attempts to rise above the poverty into which she was born and fails?
Would we say that she dreamed too big? Would we say that she could not truly
imagine herself educated, employed, or drug-free? Would we candidly conclude
that the white man will never allow a black person to succeed? And with this
conclusion, we can comfortably mark blacks as prey for a white racist system
that, without any active prompting from evil white men, will simply make it
impossible for even well-trained, highly educated blacks?318 How many times
have you heard a statement like this one: “A black person must be twice as good
as the white man just to get the job, and he must work twice as hard as the
average white person just to get ahead”? Do these propositions describe a social
reality? Or do they reinforce a social reality? Or do they co-create it? And if so,
do blacks co-creatively make their personal worlds and manifold social realities,
especially worlds and realities they would rather prefer to avoid?
In The Matrix,319 the Oracle tells Neo not to worry about the vase, and as she
eases him through what she appears to presage, Neo breaks the vase. When Neo
asked the Oracle how she knew, she replies: “What’s really going to bake your
noodle later on is would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything?” By
re-inscribing blacks either as victims or as marginal players in the manner in
which our social realities move, are we conditioning blacks to think of
themselves as spiritually impotent or as socially irrelevant?320
When we consider Black Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid, do
these compassionate liberals imagine themselves to be subjects/agents who cocreate their personal worlds and manifold social realities? It appears they
imagine themselves different from the blacks about whom they write. In these
books, blacks suffered in a world of white racism, in which a white racial state
policy denied them equal asset accumulation opportunities, plunged them into
intense poverty, and refused them access to all-white communities. Even if they
managed to become homeowners in these communities, they still would
experience isolation. Are Oliver, Shapiro, Massey, and Denton subjects/agents
because they can name a black victim’s social reality? By not imagining blacks
as powerful reality creators in the making and ending of poverty and residential
segregation, these liberal scholars confess that they too take refuge in the single
idea that they cannot be more than pencil-neck, paper-peddling academic
warriors. Unfortunately, they do not realize that through their sociological
(1997) (describing the life of Mrs. Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, a Langston College honor graduate, who
persisted in her effort to matriculate at the University of Oklahoma Law School in the 1940s).
318. See generally ELLIS COSE , THE RAGE OF THE PRIVILEGED CLASS (1995).
319. The Matrix (Warner Bros. Pictures 1999).
320. See Robinson, supra note 17, at 145.
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A NEW AGE CRITIQUE
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narratives, they have reinforced the idea that the poor and the oppressed need
them.
CONCLUSION
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference. No big deal. I didn’t
like that, but so what? What happened was really unfair, but it doesn’t
matter now. That doesn’t have anything to do with where I am now. It
really doesn’t matter.321
Neither Black Wealth/White Wealth nor American Apartheid accepted the
idea that we can change our historically derived points of view. Although both
books prescribed what it would take to create material equality between blacks
and whites and to end residential segregation, neither book positioned blacks or
minorities in the center of the human chemistry that co-created the social and
economic inequalities in the first place. As such, both books relegated the cocreative subject to historical footnotes and partially interesting marginalia.
Unlike Oliver and Shapiro and Massey and Denton, I think that we can reimagine ourselves as the powerful reality creators. In this case, we become
subjects/agents. Despite the powerful sociological narratives that Black
Wealth/White Wealth and American Apartheid represented, they described blacks
and whites as action figures, all of whom were posed by the deft hand of social
structures. In these narratives, we looked at whites as racists and wrongdoers,
failing to see them for what they are—angelic humans working through social
experiments, some wonderfully successful, some dangerously wrong.
Unfortunately, by focusing us not on a dynamic interplay between individual
consciousness and manifold social realities, especially when we seek to change
wealth, poverty, and residential segregation, Black Wealth/White Wealth and
American Apartheid invited us to react to a social structure that appeared beyond
our collective responsibility. To the extent that social structures loom over us,
rendering most of us to paralysis, individuals can control their personal worlds
and the manner in which they experience them. In the aggregate, these individual
form a critical mass, and then they change what initially appeared to history’s
runaway train. However, by simply reacting, we signal our usual, but
discomforting, impotence to change who we really are. In part, we remain in this
stagnant place because we do not realized that reactions enslave us to our
tragically suffering minds. Our current race consciousness conditions us to react,
to be victims. It is unfortunate that by now we do not realized that we co-created
poverty, wealth, and residential segregation. We did it! We can change, unless
we decide to keep these constructs.
In this regard, consider God’s perspective on how reactions do not free but
bind. According to God,
Reaction is just that—an action you have taken before. When you “react,” what you do is assess the incoming data, search your memory bank
321. Are You Letting It In?, reprinted in 16 SCI. DELIBERATE CREATION 6, 44 (2001).
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for the same or nearly the same experience, and act the way you did
before. This is all the work of the mind, not of your soul.322
More than limiting us to past experiences, reacting conditions us to live not by
choice (i.e., conscious empowerment), but by chance (i.e., unconscious
disempowerment). “A life lived by choice is a life of conscious action. A life
lived by chance is a life of unconscious reaction.”323 In the former case, a person
lives in the here and now, goes with the flow and allows emotions to dictate what
happens next. In the later case, a person lives in the past, fearing old mistakes,
old recriminations, or old embarrassments, avoids pain, judgment, and death,
with one’s reputation and possessions intact. By living consciously, we decide
quickly. We choose rapidly. We allow our souls to co-create out of our present
experiences only. We do not review. We do not analyze. We do not criticize
past encounters.324 At base, we should live now.325
One branch of Critical Legal Studies arguably embraces this New Age
perspective. It argues against the idea that the governmental system and its
institutions depend naturally and neutrally on the ideology of traditional legal
reasoning, a process that stands on objective criteria and that originates out of
rational thinking.326 In addition to rejecting legal “determinacy, objectivity, and
neutrality” and to asserting the principle of legal indeterminacy (in a word,
nihilism), Joseph Singer argues for a legal theory that empowers society from
“outworn vocabularies and attitudes.”327 This liberating, empowering legal
theory should enable us to ground our intuition and to rely on present customs.328
Like the New Age proposition that extols a life of conscious action, Singer
argues that:
Everyone has had the experience of making important, difficult moral
decisions. And almost no one does it by applying a formula. When
people decide whether to get married, to have children, to go to law
school, to move to another state, to quit their jobs, they do not apply a
theory to figure out what to do. They do not “balance all the factors” or
add up the pros and cons. In short, they do not follow a procedure that
generates, by itself, an answer. . . . and in the end, they make a decision.
And later, in looking back at it, they are sometimes pleased with their
322. 2 WALSCH, supra note 13, at 13 (emphasis in original).
323. Id. (emphasis deleted).
324. See id.; see also D.T. SUZUKI, AN INTRODUCTION TO ZEN BUDDHISM 35 (1964) (“Zen is
mystical. This is inevitable, seeing that Zen is the keynote of Oriental culture; it is what makes the
West frequently fail to fathom exactly the depths of the Oriental mind, for mysticism in its very
nature defies the analysis of logic, and logic is the most characteristic feature of Western thought.”).
325. See generally DAISETZ T. SUZUKI, ZEN AND JAPANESE CULTURE 413 (1970).
326. See Joseph William Singer, The Player and the Cards: Nihilism and Legal Theory, 94
YALE L.J. 1, 8 (1984).
327. Id.
328. See id.
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decisions, sometimes not. But they knew how to do it.329
Unfortunately, Singer’s approach still embraces a logical nature that moves us
out of living now. Its logical nature reveals itself when Singer argues that when
we make value choices, we think long and hard. We take time to imagine our
lives with or without the decision, seek opinions, place value on these varying
ideas, debate their merits, and then we decide.330 Even though he does not
venture completely down a New Age path, Singer uses Critical Legal Studies’
theoretical framework to move us away from our narrow view that law rests on
logic, reason, and objectivity, and closer to Robert Gordon’s notion that we live
through a flowing process in which we act, imagine, rationalize, and justify.331
In the end, I recommend reading these books, and I caution you not to believe
that blacks, whites, and others walk through the social historical pages as either
oppressors or oppressed, or either as the victimizers or the victimized. As Robert
Ornstein would argue, we adopted a way of thinking (i.e., race consciousness),
and we see the world through this schema. In so doing, we act as very powerful
reality creators. And we do so within our self-selected roles. We all co-create
those roles so that each of us can consciously participate in developing what
Michael Talbot called social experiments. As such, we also can co-create
personal worlds and manifold social realities, even if some of us doubt this great
gift. On this point, Zen Master Kodo Sawaki wrote:
When we consider all the phenomena of all existences through the eyes
of our illusions and errors, we may erroneously imagine that our original
nature is contingent and mobile, whereas in reality it is autonomous and
immobile. If we become intimate with our true mind and return to our
original nature, then we understand that all phenomena, all existences,
are inside our own minds, and that is true of every being.332
329. Id. at 62.
330. See id.
331. See id.
332. TEISEN DESHIMARU, THE ZEN WAY TO THE MARTIAL ARTS 20 (Nancy Amphoux trans.,
1982) (emphasis added).